


Four Days

by MumblingSage



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: (eventual) light bondage, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Character Study, Citadel domesticity, F/M, Fix-It, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Found Family, Friendship, Haircuts, Hallucinations, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Scars, Slow Burn, Symbolic Bondage, Tenderness, Vulnerability, War Rig Family, background Cheedo x Dag, gray-asexual Max, light kink, water as a metaphor for love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2018-04-12 23:19:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 41,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4498542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things you stop wanting after the end of the world. Wanting is vulnerability, and Max can’t afford to be vulnerable out in the Wasteland. But when he returns to the Citadel, he has a lot to revisit. Even if admitting what he wants might break him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Out of the Wasteland

Inside, the Citadel was crowded and noisy and dark. Each voice—and he couldn’t tell if he heard too many for the number of people present—was like a claw raking over his nerves, making them alive with irritation and anticipation of worse. Glimpses of faces—not cruel faces; most focused on their own business and a few even smiling—made him tense beneath his skin. This many strangers, his instincts clamored, in this place which held only flashes of ugly, unpleasant memories, were a bad sign.

Even though Max knew they were not. Even though anywhere else, this crowd would have been nothing more than aggravating, and he had just been among what was probably a worse one. He had agreed to come here willingly. He wasn’t a prisoner this time.

The people walking, wheeling, and being carried through the tunnels were occupied with maintenance, domestic tasks, even conversation. Their skin came in every shade and none of it was painted white. The only warriors there were himself and the woman walking beside him.

Her watchful posture, and the air of concentration she’d worn on the long drive here, had eased the farther they went through the winding halls. As they started up a flight of stairs, she pushed her hood back and ran a hand through her short-cropped hair. The crowd was sparser on the upper level, but those who were there stepped out of her way, more it seemed from respect than wariness. Maybe respect was also what kept anyone from questioning them. From asking Toast the Knowing what she was doing with a stranger out of the Wasteland.

He doubted anyone would remember him from the day the women were raised up. Just the man who drove the car, who kicked the Immortan’s corpse to the ground. The moment Furiosa climbed out and they cheered for her he had been forgotten, as it should be. Nobody in the Citadel today seemed to have seen a former bloodbag, either. It helped that his beard had grown out enough to hide his face from a casual glance. 

He had thought he’d been unrecognizable. More than that, there was no one to recognize him. When he first heard someone calling his name in that border town, he’d dismissed it. It wasn’t that he never heard voices calling out to him. Only they were ones he couldn’t answer.

‘Border town’ might be too grand a term. It wasn’t a town; it was barely a place. One hundred days before it hadn’t been anything, and in another hundred days it might be nothing again. At best, its tents would be rolled up and each board and sheet of corrugated tin would be packed up, then trucked off somewhere else, leaving dust to blow over the ruts and tire tracks that had formed streets. At worst, a raid would come through and strip it all bare.

For once, the worst wasn’t likely. The town had picked its border well—unclaimed territory, at least for now, and just a short day’s ride out from a stronghold with a reputation that discouraged raiding. Max had added this information to his map. He knew how close he came to the Citadel, but he tried not to let the knowledge be a distraction.

He was one of those warm bodies who wound up here with anything they had to spare that might be exchanged for something they wanted more. Trading goods scavenged or cobbled together. Business wasn’t brisk but deliberate, accompanied by glances that were in turns evaluating, suspicious, and rarely direct. Smoke drifted over canvas roofs, carrying the smell of roasting lizard, and a baker’s family laid out fresh cakes of insect flour. Max’s pockets and knapsack were heavy with items valuable enough to buy near anything in sight. Two knives he had taken from the Organic Mechanic’s cache, along with a spare whetstone that had kept them surgically sharp. Ammunition for a gun he didn’t have. And, taken from the belly of the War Rig before they left it for the Salt, a miraculously unbroken bottle of rotgut liquor.

There was a woman in this town legendary for the collections of old parts she had available. He walked the canvas arcade of her stall, examining everything from engine blocks to axles to handfuls of bolts laid out on fabric plush enough for ordinary people to sleep on. At last he found what he needed to repair the car he’d rolled in on.

The parts trader had to be at least 23,000 days old, but she was well-preserved. Her garments were even plusher and cleaner than the cushions for her wares. Enough of her teeth remained for her smile to gleam in her brown face and her hands were clean except for permanent crescents of oil under the nails. Her eyes were clear and bright. And, she assured him, she had no use for alcohol. She had even less use for it than for knives or bullets. And she didn’t want them, either.

There would be something in this town she wanted, if he was just able to barter for it. Failing all else, there would be water, the most liquid of commodities. But that meant more time, more wandering under the hot sun and more attempts to negotiate with minds honed sharp as needles for a bargain. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to return to his car and drive off, but if he’d been able to make another seventy klicks on the bare wheels and welded axle, not to mention with the patchwork engine, he’d never have come here in the first place.

He adjusted the weight on his back and scanned the surrounding stalls. The voice shouting to him didn’t penetrate at first. All around people were making bids and counteroffers, calling over their partners to see something, spicing their haggling with insults that ranged from the affectionate to the aggressive. And when it came again—“Max! Hey! Is that you?”—that still didn’t meant it was really _him_ they were looking for, or that _they_ were really someone looking for him. He had heard his name called often enough by nobody at all.

But this voice was different, its timbre stronger; a young woman’s voice, neither angry nor afraid. If anything, she sounded excited to see him. Her words didn’t echo in his thoughts, didn’t pulse along the borders of his skull or send images flashing from the corners of his eyes. They seemed to come from right behind him.

Max turned around. The realization that he _was_ being called, and by name, was enough of a shock that he expected nothing and anything.

A road warrior for sure, even though she was slight, younger and much better preserved than most, and not visibly armed. Few here were; he didn’t doubt she had something secreted in the pockets of her leather trousers, or hidden in her high boots or up her full sleeves. She carried herself with the hard confidence of the well-armed, the somewhat stiff poise of those prepared for anything bad.

She pushed back the hood shielding her head from the sun, revealing short, dark hair and keen eyes in a familiar bronze face. Yet as he met those eyes, they widened, suggesting she didn’t know just what to expect, either.

“It _is_ you,” she said.

He nodded.

When she approached, he let her, even though coming much closer could be considered aggressive.People tended to give each other a wide berth around here. Sheer numbers, noise, and wariness filled the air with pressure anyway. He could raise both arms without reaching anyone, but still felt crowded in.

“Do you remember me?”

“Of course.” It had been two hundred and forty six days, give or take the ones he had lost track of, since he had last seen Toast the Knowing. Aside from her outfit and some of the subtleties of her bearing, she hasn’t changed all that much.

But if she had appeared exactly the same way as he had last saw her, he could have taken her for…not herself. Something much worse. A sign that the worst had happened.

Although he wasn’t certain the ghosts were even real—and he had only ever seen them after watching someone’s death; they’d never tracked him across the Wasteland—he could have believed it.

“You’re from the Citadel,” he said, a question as much as a statement.

 “Everyone’s well,” she said, picking up at once.

He nodded, grateful.

This young woman, not a ghost, was looking at him with an intensity he almost took for suspicion. “And what about you?”

He understood, then. It was concern.

“Max?”

It was strange to be addressed by name. Not because he was entirely unused to hearing it, but because it never came in that tone—prompting, patient, fully expecting an answer. The voices of his dead had long ago become used to going unanswered.

He gave her the best he could, shrugging and saying, “I’m okay.”

“Good.” She smiled at him around the pick she settled between her teeth.

Everything had been said. But when he started to move on again—his car waited at the end of the street, such as it was, and he could reevaluate the damage, see if he could do with replacing fewer parts—Toast followed. From anyone else, following anyone else, that could have been suicidal. She had to be aware of that. The thought that she might not be was as boggling as it was alarming.

She didn’t blink or back down when he turned to stare at her. “Is that it?”

“What else?”

“I don’t feel like I should just let you go.”

He responded with the motion of one eyebrow.

It wasn’t a surprise when that failed to quell her. “You want to know how everyone’s doing? Come see for yourself. Come back with me.”

“No.”

“Why not? You know you’d be welcome there.” Something stirred in her face, and he saw that she was neither as recklessly naïve as she acted nor as poised as she appeared. At least not when it came to him. “What do you have against staying at the Citadel, anyway?”

He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. And maybe a part of her was still naïve, after all, to have to ask that question. “It’s no place for me. I’ll get what I need here.”

Toast crossed her arms, gripping the right just beneath a thick black armband of woven fabric. He remembered the night she had received that, a gift from the Vuvalini. Odd, how much seemed to change just from knowing someone’s history; looking at them and knowing how they had become what you saw. The reciprocal feeling that, looking at you, they saw the same. She couldn’t see as much as his ghosts. But she knew enough.

“We can do much better,” she said. “Think of it. Clean water. Better food—” sniffing at the smoke of cooking fires. “Somewhere safe to sleep. And we can fix your car,” she added, eyeing the vehicle he’d approached. It had rolled in on more rust that tire, and that was only one of the visible issues.

She must have seen him weakening. “We can get you anything,” she said. “And loads better than whatever you could get from the shacks here.” The angle of her head changed. “Unless you need to stop by the brothels first.”

As she said that last she met his eyes and made an exaggerated version of the face she made smelling the roasting lizards, not disgust so much as disinterest, and relief to be disinterested. They shared thin smiles. He would have laughed except his throat and the joke were both too dry for it. No shame towards those who willingly offered or respectfully traded for that service, but for him, what could be got in a brothel would be nothing but a waste of goods and time. He wouldn’t seek it at the Citadel, either, and he hadn’t been likely to assume anyone would offer.

And that was what decided him, in the end. Being joked with. On top of which, it wasn’t a bad invitation.

“Okay,” he said.

“That means you’ll go?”

He shrugged. “Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you do.” Her expression fell, and beneath it flashed a spark as if in response to an insult or accusation.

His own attempt at humor—if that was all it was—hadn’t landed right. He said more solemnly, “Well, I’ll go.”

“That’s good.” Her smile returned, broke wider. She didn’t look a bit like a road warrior when she grinned. “I can bring my rig around to yours. We’ll hook it up, pull it back.”

He nodded and started walking again towards the vehicle. She walked with him a ways. Before she turned off, waving a signal that made him realize for the first time that she hadn’t come alone, she murmured, “She’ll be glad to see you.”

First he took the emotion that swept through him for dread. Heavy, cold expectation, growing through his chest, putting pressure on his guts and lungs. By the time it passed, before he could figure out whatever it was about, Toast had approached his car and was examining it. She asked questions over her shoulder about the parts that needed fixing, and as he answered the clammy anticipation was forgotten. By the time the sun was westering, they were underway.

Toast’s vehicle, although ‘rig’ might be grandiose, was a truck tall enough that not only did she have to climb up into it, but so did her escort—two boys who might be former War Pups or lifted up from the wretched who gathered around the Citadel. Their slight frames could stem from youth or malnutrition. They and Max greeted each other silently in between adding a substitute wheel to his car and chaining it to the back of hers.

Her truck was bright against the rusting hulks surrounding it, freshly painted with stripes of sun red and desert gold. The bed, which the men clambered into, was covered by a metal frame, and the window between it and the cab was hung with light fabric. More fabric had been draped over the seats, not enough to smother but enough to make the old leather more comfortable and…pretty, Max decided. His eyes traced an embroidered pattern in deep purple that could be a star or even a flower. Vuvalini—he recognized the style from the blankets they had given him with the motorcycle. A motorcycle now slowly rusting at the edge of the Salt, unless someone else had come along to salvage it. Glancing back through the gauze curtain at the hulk of his current vehicle rattling along behind them, he almost regretted leaving the cycle there. Almost.

Toast reached under the wheel before starting, her fingers moving to the click of hidden switches. As they rode from the town onto the gravel flats, she shifted gears. Max had politely kept his gaze averted from the kill switches, but the brightly polished gearshift caught his eye. The grip had a finger guard like a hilt and below that it bulged like the cylinder of a revolver. Which it was. He knew why it looked familiar; the gun had rattled on the floor of the Immortan’s Gigahorse as he pulled Furiosa in, lay her down. Toast had claimed it and transformed it. A tyrant’s gun into a gearshift; not a bad trophy.

The scar that gun had left was a thin, irregular line in front of her right ear, faint enough that it might be overlooked unless you already knew it would be there. He did. It didn’t mar her looks, and she didn’t seem to be self-conscious about it, but it stirred memories in his brain like dust rising in a wave around their wheels.

***

The moan of the desert wind around the cab, and the strumming of the Gigahorse’s flags above, almost covered the low sound of Furiosa’s breathing. Her chest rose and fell, slightly, slowly, not steadily enough for his liking. But watching and worrying wouldn’t help that. The red stream still flowed through the tubing connecting them, and that at least was steady and helpful.

He was slowly coming back to himself, after it seemed like he had been drawn inside her with his blood. Lost in her failing body, and if it failed completely…

But it hadn’t.

He looked up, around. The Vuvalini on one side and the pale-haired girl on the other still held the needles steady in his and Furiosa’s arms. He felt the pressure of their hands, a slight sting below his right elbow that wasn’t quite painful. The other three women (not wives) leaned against the back of the seat, looking down at them with drawn faces. Damp with sweat or drying tears. Calmer now, still worried of course but mostly okay—except the one on the far left was injured, a blow that had split the smooth bronze skin on the side of her face.

Something to do besides watch and worry and wait. Something helpful. He met the young woman's eyes and gestured her closer. “You’re bleeding.”

She climbed over the seat. He found another scrap of clean-enough cloth and began to dab first at the thin smear of blood under her nose, then at the edges of the wound. Working with his left hand, not wanting to jar the needle in his right arm, he wasn’t as steady as he wanted to be. She winced with the corner of her mouth but held still.

“Sorry,” he murmured absently, peering into her eyes. They were clear, the pupils even, and everything under his hand seemed to feel all right.

She asked, “Are _you_ okay?”

Unsure how to reply, he only nodded. A few bruises and scratches. His hand still worked, and the hole through it had stopped bleeding, but it hurt so much it might as well have gone numb. The ringing in his right ear hadn’t subsided after two gunshots in as many days. He was thirsty, although the Vuvalini already reached for one of the water canisters they had found in the vehicle. Drinking felt like work. He was tired. Almost tired enough to let go, to flow out with his blood, to drain, to sink, to rest.

Instead he had to pull his faculties together, and his thoughts. It was a slow process made strange, because this time he hadn’t been broken down so much as broken open. There was nothing to resist or fight. He couldn’t draw strength from the engine of rage he had carried inside for so long, which seemed to have stalled. There was the other old standby, survival instinct—somehow crossed, transferred from himself to her. Furiosa. Alive, safe…victorious.

He didn’t know what hope felt like, but it was taking all his strength not to start shaking in relief. And no, he wasn’t okay. Whatever the direction of the break, he was broken nonetheless.

“So, Max.” The name jolted through him. The young woman didn’t seem to find anything wrong; she was smiling. “I’m Toast. Some of them call me Toast the Knowing.”

“I’m Capable,” said the one who leaned over the seat, her hands still resting close to Furiosa.

“Cheedo,” murmured the tall girl with an arm on Capable’s shoulder.

From beside him, “They call me the Dag.”

“Thanks,” Max said. “Thank you.” He finished cleaning Toast’s cut and gave her the cloth to hold in place; bandaging her wound properly would have to wait until the Citadel. Their introductions didn’t lead to more conversation, which he was also grateful for. They hadn’t been awkward—courtesy didn’t feel entirely out of place here. He didn’t think of it as more than courtesy.

He’d given Furiosa his name because he felt he had to, an offering as essential as his blood, for reasons he didn’t examine. These women, too, deserved to know who he was. After all they had gone through together, names weren’t too much to share. But intimacy between them wouldn’t go beyond that. Their routes ran together for a short while yet.

He’d hold himself as if unbroken for that long.

He packed the contents of the medical kit away, once more working with his left hand. His right, keeping still because of the needle and cannula, cradled the back of Furiosa’s head. His thumb was stroking her face, had been all this while, even when he was nearly too shaken to notice. Her hair prickled against his palm as she stirred, then settled again. He listened to her breathing grow stronger. They remained like that until, kilometers later, she opened her eyes. 


	2. First Day: Water

And so, inside the Citadel—it had been the Citadel before Joe occupied it, and would be known as such for a long time yet—he followed Toast into a chamber off the upper-level corridor. Like most of them, it was a cave as much as a room. Light came from a small lamp on a side table and from another source behind a curtain, a sheet of gauzy fabric hanging across the far side. On the opposite wall, there hung the wheel that belonged presumably to the occupant. It was simply designed, its steel spokes etched with the vanes and barbs of feathers. Nothing else decorated the plain space. Bare, clean rock. Quiet, too, except for a distant thunder like a pulse pounding in his ears. But not his own; Max felt calm. He didn’t hear a murmur from either inside or outside his head.

Then the curtain was pushed aside, and she came through.

Over her shoulder he caught a glimpse of a window, and through it the shimmer of spray cascading before a cliff face. The sound he had been hearing was real, then, from the waterfall.

He couldn’t look directly at her at first. When his gaze dropped it went to her left shoulder, then followed the straps over it to her arm. This was a new prosthesis, a replacement for the one she had lost on the fury road. Fastened by a combination of belts at her waist and shoulder and a leather cuff on her upper arm, it looked smaller and simpler than the first, but as he watched the fingers curled and uncurled in an unconscious gesture, revealing the elegance and cleverness of the design.

Slowly his eyes came up to her face. Her hair had grown out a little, feathering around the curves of her ears, revealing its color. The tawny shade of a sandstorm. She’d cocked her head to look at him, and now she shook it to toss an errant strand back from over her brow in a sharp, unfamiliar gesture. It could only have grown so long if she hadn’t had or made time to cut it.

And now he was fully facing her, thinking about her, unable to avoid the reality of her presence any longer. It shouldn’t be so overwhelming to confront. Of course, it made sense that Toast would bring him to Furiosa.

“How are you?” she asked him. Her voice was soft but something moved in it, enough that he could lose himself in trying to figure out all she might mean. If it was anything besides the obvious.

He nodded, shrugged.

“I found him in that border town,” Toast said. “Half a day south of the Bullet Farms, around the Buzzards’ old territory.”

“How was it there?” Furiosa’s eyes flickered to her, another layer underlying the question.

“Quiet, otherwise.”

“Maybe I should go with you next time.”

“If you want.” Toast didn’t break into a grin, but her tone was light, easy. “I don’t think it’ll need your special touch.”

“Next time—” and it wasn’t all of it, but at least one of the layers in their conversation _was_ humor, as if at an understatement—“we’ll be going on a trading mission.”

“Which reminds me. I promised we’d fix his car.”

Both of them looked at Max. Still on the verge of smiling. Including him in it. The room seemed warmer, not stifling, but as if the glow of sunlight through the curtain became brighter. “Of course we will,” Furiosa said.

He could only nod again. Grateful, yes, glad, yes, but not sure how to put those things in words. Only half able to follow the conversation, much less join it.

He was thinking, if _she_ had been at the border town Furiosa might not have chased after him like Toast did. She would have let him go. At least he thought so. She _had_ let him go, once.

If she had been the one he met in the border town, she might not have had to.

He pushed down the feeling again, the one that wasn’t quite sick, wasn’t unambiguous enough to be anticipation, and managed to smile at Toast as she made her way out. Furiosa followed her to the door, murmuring something—he caught mention of the border town again but also of “the car,” so that they might be talking about this upcoming trade mission or about how she had found him. Maybe both.

“Hey.” Toast met his eyes. “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah.”

And Furiosa was turning from the door as it closed, and they were alone together.

In some ways it would have been easier if they had met out in the Wasteland. Not in a trading settlement; in an ambush or a firefight. A crisis. He didn’t want one, by any means—in the midst of frantic action, you didn’t notice how much you _hated_ every second of it, the strain of every moment in danger—but it would be simpler than this. At least he’d know the right thing to do.

“She told me you all were well,” he said.

“We are. You can meet the others if you want.”

“Yes.” The churning didn’t stop but surged, restless. He did want to see the other women, their companions, his… _friends_ wasn’t the right word. But it came closest.

The thought of seeing more people, of meeting friends, was almost too much to consider.

“They’ll be glad to see you. If we can pull them from their own projects.” Furiosa tipped her head towards the door. “They don’t all wander like she does.”

 _Wandering_ wasn’t the word, although he didn’t think she was deliberately trying to deceive him by it. Possibly she spoke out of habit, after however long she and Toast had been keeping the mission secret.

And it was a mission. He hadn’t asked Toast what she was doing in that border town which offered nothing the Citadel couldn’t do better. She was either there to trade anyway—a task she’d given up on spotting him—or to scout the place out. To see if it would bring threats into the Citadel’s territory or else an opportunity. Given her terse but meaningful report, he suspected the latter.

She was more than clever enough to be a scout, and she was sharp-witted and cautious—at least around anyone but him. She could survive the Wasteland.  All four of the young women could, if it came down to it, all four of them _had._ But they shouldn’t have to. Not when they already lived somewhere better, somewhere safe. It was a feeling that had shadowed him from the moment he first saw her, that split second of uncertainty when he might have taken her for a new ghost. Although Toast had been doing well so far—you always did fine right up to the point that you didn’t.

He’d seen enough of what happened once things stopped going well.

 “She’s a road warrior,” he said.

“And so?” He’d revealed more than he meant to in his tone, and Furiosa matched it, her answer calm but with an edge, her head cocked again.

“It’s not a good life.”

The edge barely sharpened as she crossed her arms, right hand to left elbow, and asked, “Then why did you go back to it?”

His reasons didn’t come to his tongue right away. He’d never needed to voice them before, nor to articulate them to himself. He’d just known. For some reason he’d expected Furiosa to understand. Max left because he always left in the end, he always moved on.

At least when he was able to. When he wasn’t trapped, or entangled. He looked up at her, feeling his expression harden defensively. Should he have stayed here? In his old prison?

Yet it was theirs, too, hers and the other women’s—both a prison and a home, and somehow they had reconciled that. Unless they hadn’t entirely. Unless that was part of why Toast ranged into the Wasteland, made herself into a road warrior. It wasn’t a bad idea when viewed that way—risky, but not bad—making herself stronger, ensuring she would never be defenseless again. Preparing to protect others, too, he realized in a flash of insight. All of them would, with their projects.

Maybe, like he once had, they searched for righteous causes. The trouble always came after finding one. Even if you left—everything resolved, accomplished—and it should be enough to know that bit of goodness existed in the world, at least for now—they were hard to free yourself from. They were dangerous. Not least to themselves.

“You asked me to bring them home,” he said to Furiosa. Managing not to choke on the memory of her struggling breath at his ear, of something worse than captivity: desperation, the absolute wild _madness_ of it. “I did. _Your_ home.”

His was long gone. All that remained were entrapments—causes or prisons—that he stayed in until he could free himself.

She hadn’t been stern before, but something relaxed around her eyes, which didn’t meet his. As if she had expected him to say something much worse. Maybe to ask if it mattered at all.

And some tension uncoiled in him, too, at the shift in her expression. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t feel entangled with her. Or trapped. But it wasn’t her fault, wasn’t anybody’s fault, and he could never resent her for it. Even though she had once got into him so deeply he had almost broken apart. She had never asked for that. And through it he had learned he could survive the breaking, survive vulnerability, at least once. At one point in his life he would have found it a violation—but he’d since experienced both and he knew the difference. And he could endure both. So he had held her once, desperately, broken open, pouring out his blood and his name. So he had brought her home. So he had left.

And she was still trying to understand why.

 “It is my home now,” she said. “But before that...” Her eyes went to the wheel, tracing the spokes shaped like crow feathers, and didn’t return to his until after she murmured, “You know.”

She had also lost a home; he saw it happen. She survived.

“You’re stronger than me,” he said, without bitterness, without rancor, but nonetheless saying too much.

It was because he was distracted. The voice whispered in his ear, faint and almost gentle, yet unmistakable. _Where were you, Max? Why did you leave?_

He wasn’t sure if his ghost was really there, or if he only remembered what she had said. The accusations she had chased him with the last time he fled down these halls.

He didn’t want to do it again. Didn’t want to suddenly break lose and bolt, although it would have made sense if he had. Running was what he did.

_Why are you running, Max?_

As if his ghosts hadn’t already caught up with him.

“It isn’t about strength,” Furiosa said. “We could have used you here.”

 _Could have used_ , not _needed_. He’d known they didn’t need him. But it was something to hear it confirmed by the very lack of confirmation in her words, words that made his presence…useful, but only that. Not bad to have around. Like an extra waterskin or a second spare part.

If they hadn’t needed him, then he hadn’t abandoned them. Either by leaving or by not coming back. No matter what the ghosts whispered.

There was a dream he’d been having, mostly while asleep. It began with his heartbeat. Pounding, faster and faster, accelerating and then cracking and then crackling until it was streamers of red, attenuated and waving, rising and churning and consuming. Until it was flame. Sometimes he was surrounded by the burning. Sometimes it was more distant. Lately, he would only be able to see the smoke, to smell its choking acridness and try to follow its dark cloud until his eyes watered, trying to see where the source was. What could burn so much.

Somewhere green. Somewhere growing.

Usually he was able to glimpse it, the gathering of green-topped towers, no longer growing anything but pillars of fire. Too far in the distance for him to do anything but watch. And then it was gone in the time it took his heart to pulse in one more frantic beat.

If Max told her that, she might think it was one of the reasons why he’d stayed away. It wasn’t. If anything, it could have made him return. At least it would have if he’d believed that they needed him, that his presence would make a difference. It had been a pull he resisted, trying to train himself not to feel it. At least he might stop being haunted by the living.

He’d broken their shared gaze already, but felt a sickly drop in his stomach when Furiosa turned her back on him. He’d explained too much, he’d said the wrong thing. That he had thought about it, weighing words, that he had tried to do better, only made failure more frustrating.

But she was leaning over a table against the far wall. He heard the clatter of pottery and then the unmistakable sound of pouring liquid. She returned to him with a cup full of water.

It was the simplest and most profound gesture of hospitality he knew of, and he could accept it without fumbling.

 “I’m…” he began. He didn’t usually start sentences he didn’t know how to finish; words came too hard for that. But now he floundered. _I’m crazy,_ he could have said, an explanation in itself. _I’m a fool._ Apologies. Or warnings. _I’m sorry._

She said, straight-faced but wryly, “You’re reliable.”

She couldn’t mean predictable. But whatever she did mean, he was grateful. He nodded at her over the rim of the cup and drank. It was cold enough to sting his teeth, and his throat contracted as he swallowed. It made talking both difficult and unnecessary.

 She didn’t seem to expect him to say anything. She didn’t even watch him drink, but she stood nearby. Her closeness didn’t make him feel crowded.

After he finished, she took the cup. Their fingers didn’t brush. But they almost did; he was aware of exactly how close they came. He hadn’t touched her, and he didn’t need to just to prove that she was there. But he wouldn’t have flinched from the contact.

He didn’t flinch from her eyes, although there was something in them—not hard, not sharp, but bright. She said, “I didn’t know you were going to leave.”

He’d seen her on the platform, looking behind herself, expecting to find him there. Reliable.

“I didn’t, either,” he said.

He’d suspected that they wouldn’t have stayed together much longer, but he hadn’t been sure. A thread had remained of—entanglement? Of hope? And as they began to rise, it snapped.

The silence that followed was broken by a knock at the door. It beat a pattern, loud and cheerful.

The person who came in wore a jacket patched with dark oil stains and hair in dozens of chin-length braids. “The Knowing told me I could find you up here.” A nod to Furiosa, respectful but not cautious. The easiness of manner made Max suspect the mechanic had been part of the wretched rather than the Citadel’s hierarchy, although the latter seemed not to have survived in anything like its previous form.

“Your car,” the mechanic started, and the jaunty tone became graver. Max wasn’t attached to the vehicle; he had dug it out of a dune and resurrected the engine to coughing life, but it was only a way to get to places. Or away from them. Still, for the sake of that his heart dropped as he expected to hear it was beyond salvage.

“We can fix it,” he was quickly reassured. “Or rebuild, where that’s what it comes down to. We’re, ah, kind of busy with other—anyway—” with a glance at Furiosa, who didn’t react at all to this revelation. “—but if a rush job would help, we can do that.”

“How long?” Max asked.

“About four days.”

If he’d been able to pick up the parts he needed at the border settlement he could have got the car underway before nightfall. It probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as what they could do in the garage here, wouldn’t have brought him as far. And four days wasn’t so many.

It was a day longer than he had spent in their presence, Furiosa’s and the others, almost two hundred and forty six days before. Everything that had changed in the Citadel since then began in those three days. They’d changed themselves, too. Freed themselves.

He didn’t know how much credit he deserved for that. Or what in himself had changed, only that something had. What he remembered most was the feeling of being broken open. Of what had surged to the surface, desperate and alive.

Two hundred and forty six days had been enough to piece a shell back together. He’d survived. That was what he was good at.

Four days. He knew that at the end of them, he would be free to go.

He glanced Furiosa’s way. “Yeah,” he said. “Four days isn’t too much.”

***

He had a room of his own, or something like a room, a niche off a corridor created and covered by a twist in the rock. It was private and felt secure. It was also pitch dark.

Trying to sleep without any sight of the stars disoriented him, skewed his perceptions. Out in the Wasteland, however confused he might be waking up, a look towards the sky could at least provide some sense of direction or coordinates. In here, he could be anywhere.

When the smell of cold rock reminded him just where he was, it didn’t help. Scent cut straight to instinct. Even if he was no longer caged, even if he no longer wore the muzzle, he couldn’t let his guard down in the Citadel. Couldn’t risk missing a warning or a chance to escape.

He moved his hands, trying to remind himself he wasn’t bound. He couldn’t see the fingers waving in front of his face. He could have been struck blind and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Could have been trapped permanently in darkness as black as his brain. Helpless. Lost.

Blindness wasn’t his most common nightmare, but he didn’t look forward to the prospect of waiting to fall into it. Usually during these periods of insomnia he could sit up, take watch, drive. Do something other than stare into the dark.

He swung his feet carefully to the floor and felt his way into the hall. Torches were still burning, and he began to walk by their light. Shafts overhead that had let in the sun during the day now breathed streams of cooler air. They were too far up and too narrow for him to glimpse starlight through them. He climbed stairs and ladders higher, then followed as the passage floor sloped down. For a time he was bracketed by thick pipes gurgling with water. And then he turned at a bend and the hallway widened into a long chamber.

A line of benches had been carved from the wall rock beneath the skylights, but no one lay there. Max himself didn’t consider it for a moment. The cages that hung above them had been removed, and so had the V-8 altar with its rack of wheels at the far end, but he recognized the place.

He backed away as if turning would attract the attention of something waiting in there. He knew there was nothing. He knew it was over. The reminder was unwelcome, anyway.

As he retraced his steps he spotted another figure ahead. He would have avoided them, as much for his sake as their own, but there were no places to turn off in the corridor. When his eyes darted, searching the shadows for one anyway, they caught a lantern’s gleam off metal at her left hand.

He brought his gaze to Furiosa’s and nodded a silent greeting. Her chamber, he recalled now, was somewhere on this level. He wondered whether she had taken a watch or if she was only wandering, as restless as he was. When he stepped towards the wall to give her space to pass, she hesitated. Without saying anything, she looked him over. Hard to tell what she saw. A very tired man, probably. He breathed unsteadily—not from walking but because of where he had been walking from. Could she see that in his expression?

With a tilt of her head, she told him, “Come with me.” It was phrased between a request and a suggestion. And he granted it, accepted it, followed her down the corridor and deeper into the coils of the Citadel. Before he had tried to keep track of each turn; now he only let her lead. They were heading lower, though he never saw the stairs Toast had brought him up. Instead they climbed ladders and once they entered a mechanical lift, which Furiosa operated as easily as he should have expected. Max wasn’t afraid of heights or even of trusting himself to groaning machinery, but it wasn’t his preferred way of getting around, and the descent was slow, humming and creaking all the way in a dark shaft.

And then the lift came to a halt, and they stepped off it and out under the deep blue of the desert night.

They were on the ground between the buttes of the Citadel, below the slender connecting bridges. Directly ahead, the waterfall poured into a stream ribboning the sand. The river—he remembered the word after a moment’s thought—wound off towards the gathering of huts that had sprung up. Permanent homes of mud-brick and metal scraps, not elegant but stable.

At this time of night, the spigots controlling the falls had been dialed back so that they no longer gushed in a crashing wave but flowed, a steady trickle. The Citadel practiced conservation for the night without shutting the water entirely off. It might slow but it could never stop. The people living in those houses must always be able to see the water, its visible plenty. They’d know they had a right to it and it would always be available, so that there was no need to struggle or fight for it. A simple idea with powerful repercussions. He wondered which of the women came up with it—or maybe all of them had.

He glanced at Furiosa, who started walking along a smaller, left-hand branch of the stream. This one ran into the shadows of the butte. The water gathered there into a still pool, partially sheltered by an outcrop of rock. It was clear enough to see to the bottom and easily the deepest body of water he had seen in thousands of days, as much as nine or ten hands. The waterfall remained audible, echoing off stone with a rhythmic chime.

He had stopped beneath the falls when he left. Joined the rest of the wretched drinking their fill. Mouths open, faces wet, skin washed clean of dust, scrubbed by the furious cascade. They weren’t frantic; thirsty but joyous. It wasn’t charity but celebration, the beginning and promise of a new age. And the moment he saw the water flowing he had known he couldn’t go up into the Citadel. How much easier it was sometimes to fix parts of the world than to fix yourself. The sight had shocked him into remembering who he was and why he couldn’t possibly do what he had been about to. He didn’t belong in a place like that.

Max was a man for the end of the world; he didn’t belong anywhere near a new beginning.

So he thought once. He had been able to bear proximity to this one, and even a little more than that. And he drank it in with the rest of them, the taste so cold and clear it stung, cupped in his hands like something sacred. All of them in that moment were like the Wasteland bands that still held to ancient sacraments, like the old and obscure tradition of anointing a new child’s head with water. A longing to begin with immersion in something precious and clean.

Furiosa was undressing. Unbuckling belts, pulling her trousers down and loosening the metal arm, getting off her shirt one-handed. She stripped so swiftly and matter-of-factly that he didn’t have time for surprise to register.

Standing with her toes at the edge of the water, she looked over her shoulder at him. The invitation was clear, and equally matter-of-fact. After a moment, he tugged his shirt over his head. His hesitation wasn’t from modesty, only an instinctive unease. He hadn’t been completely naked in more than a hundred days. In the Wasteland, it wasn’t a good idea. Sponging quickly with a damp rag was the best bathing that could be managed, and taking anything off your body meant a chance of never being able to put it back on again. Baring your flesh was even more risky.

Nothing would be damaged or snatched here. And he wasn’t nervous or ashamed of having her see him. Not that she was gawking. She’d turned her back on him now as she started into the water. And that revealed trust as much as respect, and familiarity. As if they’d always known each other well enough for this.

He dropped his shirt beside hers on the sand and added his belt and boots. He looked down his bare arm to the cord bracelet on his wrist. The pressure of it against his skin, constant, no longer even registered. It could be adjusted with a tug on the end strands, pulled even tighter or loosened to slip off. He had left it on for so many days that the stands would probably be difficult to budge. In the end, he kept it where it was.

His fingers made quicker work of the brace at his knee, but not without reluctance. Or at least uncertainty. He wore the brace even to sleep, in case he had to get up and move in a hurry. It had been a long time since he tried walking without it. The first steps on naked legs hurt, not badly but with a stinging twinge deep towards the bone. When he entered the water, it changed into a different sensation.

The waves licking up his legs and around his waist still held lingering warmth from the sun, but the sandy bottom was cold under his feet. He crouched, letting the water rise to his chin. The weight of it pressed against his chest, but also seemed to lift his body up, and it felt clean and refreshing in a way too new to him to describe. He ducked his head under the surface. Opened his mouth. Came up sputtering.

From his right, through the constant low ringing in that ear, he heard a sharp, short breath. Then another. Her laughter. He knelt in the pool, buoyant, with water streaming from his hair past his eyes, dripping from his mouth and nose, trickling like cold fingers down his neck and shoulders, and he laughed, too. It came out as a hard bark, from a throat that felt cracked, and droplets flew from his lips.

Furiosa ducked under with more control, and when her head came up she ran her hand through her wet hair. She no longer smiled, but her expression was peaceful. She seemed to savor the sensual luxury of the water as much as he did. As if almost two hundred and fifty days weren’t nearly enough time to grow used to it. But then, he guessed they wouldn’t be, even if someone wallowed in it—and Furiosa wasn’t the kind to wallow.

She gathered a handful of sand to scrub her skin. Mirroring her, he scoured until his body was red, tingling, and cleaner. The pool wasn’t big enough to avoid each other even if they wanted to, and though he could turn to give her privacy, it seemed unnecessary. Their steps had kicked up fine sand that made the water opaque enough for anyone’s modesty. She didn’t seem to have much. She met his glance without a change of expression.

Her hand ran over her left arm and her chest, then stirred waves as she worked on her legs. Her back seemed harder to reach, not just because of her absent hand. Some parts of the body were troublesome to wash alone. As she stretched for the base of her right shoulder blade, he stepped closer. She looked his way and then turned, giving him access. He rubbed her shoulders until they flushed pink from the friction and maybe from the warmth of his hand. Against the cool water, skin felt sharply hot. Muscle, wiry and firm even while relaxed, shifted under his fingers when she rolled her shoulders. He moved on, down her spine and ribs to the small of her back, then up to the nape of her neck.

He rinsed her skin with cupped handfuls of water, letting it trickle lightly over the brand. Burn tissue rasped against the pad of his thumb as he chased away a drop. She shifted again, muscles flexing without growing tense. He wondered how long she’d worn the mark. If it had become just a part of her, the way scars eventually did.

She turned around and he dropped his arms. Furiosa looked at him—her eyes lowering slightly, because they were close enough for the finger of her greater height to make a difference—a look that wasn’t an order, only waiting. Even knowing that she just wanted to return the favor, he had to brace himself before showing his back to her. Something no one else had ever seen, no one who mattered anyway, no one who looked and saw _him._ Showing the words he’d wear until death, not marking a person but information about a resource. Labeling. He could live with it. One day the words, too, would be part of him; they wouldn’t mean anything more. But not yet. Especially not tonight, right after he had seen the hall where the cages used to hang.

Furiosa’s hand moved in gentle circles. She stopped frequently to rinse sand from the whorls of crude lettering, and he could feel the weight of her gaze, but he didn’t think she was trying to read what was written there. It was upside down, after all, and the fact that he was an isolated psychotic found on the Powder Lakes wouldn’t be news to her.

“After we…came up,” she said, “we cleared out the blood bank. First thing, almost.”

She hadn’t talked to him since _Come with me,_ but there was nothing in the way she spoke now to suggest this wasn’t a continuation of that same conversation. He let her voice run over him along with her hand, not feeling any pressure to reply.

“There were War Boys there, sick ones. Luckily they didn’t give us any trouble. But we had the Pups unhook them from their…” She didn’t say the word, but her next sentence wasn’t about the War Boys. “And then we let _them_ go, if they wanted to. With food and water for twenty days and a token for safe passage.

“Some of them stayed. They’ve got work as mechanics, or as builders, or in the gardens. They…” Trailing off, she nudged him to turn. He didn’t need her to reach his sides and chest, but he let her anyway.

“What about the War Boys?” he asked a few moments later, not because he cared so much as to show he was listening. The women might see their captor’s army as fellow victims; they had not only kindness but a theory explaining it. He didn’t think they were wrong. But that didn’t mean he found it easy to see what they did about the men who were the reason he’d been imprisoned and nearly exsanguinated.

“We don’t have as much need to replace blood anymore,” she said, and she was moving around to his right side, the ear that was half-muffled with tinnitus, so it was hard to make out her tone. “To treat sickness, some of us give on a voluntary basis.”

“Hmm,” he said. Still feeling her touch, and the water, grounded while his thoughts flew. Picturing it. Four young women in white throwing open cages and untying hands. Cutting locks. Filing muzzles. Freeing the captives, treating the sick elsewhere, leaving that place clean and empty and never again to be used for its old purpose. It was over. This time he knew it in his marrow. Saw not only the emptiness of the place but how it came to be that way. And that made the memory weaker, began to lay it to rest.

The tattoo was far from the only scar her fingers found, always so gentle, not because she was avoiding them but because that was how she touched him tonight. Carefully. Knowing he wasn’t used to it. The scars weren’t new to her; everybody had scars. Some, like the one that hooked through the hair above his left ear, he couldn’t even remember the story behind, didn’t know where or how he got them. Others, like the painful _looseness_ in his knee, he couldn’t forget.

And she was the story of some of these scars. Because of her, he wore rings of scar tissue on the smallest and second fingers on his left hand, and a hole through the palm that had healed but left gaps of sensation where the nerves were severed, dead. There was ringing in his right ear that would never entirely go away. There was a very faint mark on his left arm which still hadn’t decided if it would fade or if it would stay, no larger than the point of a needle. She had a matching mark on her right, and because of him she had a white knot between two ribs—almost vanishing among her other scars, yet he knew where to look.

After rinsing, a last waterfall down his body, Furiosa stepped back, finished. She moved towards the shore but didn’t get out. Instead she sat in the shallows, cross-legged, seemingly enjoying the wet embrace a little longer.

He didn’t want to leave the water, either. He waded out of it just long enough to take his shirt from the sand, then carried it back into the pool. He held it under and felt it get heavier with wetness. At first it turned muddy from caked-in dust. He scrubbed it against the surface of the rock outcropping with as much force as the old fabric could stand. If it changed color, he couldn’t tell in the dark, but it had to be at least somewhat cleaner.

He left his shirt on the rock to dry and glanced Furiosa’s way for permission before taking hers. He handled it more gently, the fine cloth clinging to his fingers as water soaked through. It was already much cleaner than his, but it was a pleasant job. She waded in beside him and, starting with the sleeves of his shirt, squeezed out excess water and pressed the fabric flat to dry. He passed hers over when he was done washing it and just watched her work, using both her fingers and the nub of her left arm. Her wet skin shone; her hair was dark and stuck to her skull. She tried to toss it from her forehead once, but the damp had pasted it down.  

Once both shirts were drying, she went back ashore to rifle through the pouches on her leather belt. She took out a small pair of shears, and what looked like a sliver of a larger mirror, probably salvaged from a wreck, its jagged edges and back shielded by a clay frame. She sat on the sand with the mirror positioned against the rock. Her gestures were so deliberate that he couldn’t tell if she’d always planned to trim her hair after washing or if it was a decision made out of one last annoyance.

As she reached for the prosthesis, he saw the end of her left arm, how tender it looked. Still adjusting to the new fit, although he couldn’t assume a heavy piece like that ever got completely comfortable with time.

“I can do that,” he offered. She turned his way and after a moment, nodded.

He knelt beside her, glimpsing both of them in the mirror. His fingers slid through her hair, stopped just above her skull. She nodded when he held up the strands, silently checking the length. She didn’t quite want her head shaved, but it close to it. Practical.

He let the scraps of hair, soft but too short to be good for much, fall to the sand. He moved slowly, careful and concentrating, but soon picked up a rhythm. His other hand cradled the back of her neck. The weight of her head settled on it. Her eyes were closed, her expression as peaceful as it had been in the water. The ends of her hair lapped over his fingers. Bit by bit he cut them shorter, until he felt only a soft fuzz against his palm. She turned, still resting with his support, and the pressure felt like nuzzling.

At last she opened her eyes. She reached up and brushed his temple, just beneath the hairline and above the rasp of his beard. He handed the shears back to her. He didn’t turn to the mirror, though; he wasn’t comfortable at the thought of the shears coming from behind him. They faced each other. Some part of him, the part that remembered, expected this to be rough—hands tugging at him and all but pulling hair out by the roots. Of course it wasn’t. In fact the only hands touching him were his own, guiding where she should put the shears, sometimes helping to hold a clump of hair or the blade handles steady. It would have been much more practical if she had put the metal arm on after all, but it wasn’t as if his appearance could possibly get _worse_. He didn’t have her trim as close to the skull as he had on her, partly because he was used to his hair longer and partly for a margin of error. At the end, she put the shears down and held up the mirror for him as he combed tufts down with his fingers. He was surprised by the apparent improvement.

Then she started on the beard, tipping his face up and bracing his chin on the nub of her left arm. It wasn’t hard to hold still for her, even when baring his neck, even when feeling the sharp edge so close to his skin. She was careful. Her eyes narrowed and a corner of her lips pulled. After watching it for a few minutes he wondered if she was smiling.

She pulled back and studied him as a whole. Her fingers ran along his jaw and she nodded. So he must look improved to her, too. Vanity was as dead as modesty, but he had the thought nonetheless. It felt almost as good as being clean again.

She packed the shears and mirror back in her pouch, but left it and her belt on top of her leather trousers without putting them on. He didn’t get dressed yet, either. It was quiet here and they had all night to rest in private.

When he lay back he could see the stars overhead. Tracing familiar shapes, he kept his eyes open until they began to feel gritty. Then they watered as he closed them. He heard sand shift beneath her body, and in the distance the rush of the falls. Closer, his heartbeat, slow. Steady.

The flames didn’t come, and neither did the ghosts. He had dreams rather than nightmares, and they faded before memory could take hold of them.

When he woke, she was still sitting on the shore. Dressed now. His clothes lay beside him, more neatly arranged than he had left them. His shirt was mostly dry, with a few patches that felt pleasantly clammy against his skin when he pulled it on. The air was as cool now as it would ever get. Already the eastern sky had turned gray, flushing with hints of orange and blue. Before the sun was entirely up, he and Furiosa had gone back up to the Citadel.

She stopped the lift at the level that held his room. Along the corridor, he took one of the torches burning on the wall and brought it in. He found a rack for it beside the bed after feeling for an iron ring in the stone. Hot light flooded the space, revealed every curve of the rock and all the small corners. It shone behind his lids when he shut them. He could have gone back to sleep in it, but instead he stepped out, into the day.


	3. Second Day: Green

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really do owe everyone an apology for taking so long with this update. Life caught up with me, and when I did write I got lost trying to do justice to every character’s introduction. Ultimately, the muse was fickle. The good news is she didn’t just woo me to work on other stories, but also to draft later scenes from this one (I’ll be honest: the NC-17 chapters). Which means it should never take me so long to update “Four Days” again, barring an unprecedented emergency. I promise, I’m seeing this one through. I’m not going to walk off and leave you hanging on an ascending platform to the Citadel or something. I mean, who does that?

Even this early, the Citadel was busy, but the crowds and noise were less troubling. He felt less enclosed now that he could remember a way out, the route Furiosa had shown him. It meant he wasn’t lost and wasn’t trapped. It meant he could leave any time he wanted to. And though he wouldn’t leave, not today, that meant he was staying by choice.

He found the canteen and ate breakfast quickly—a sort of thick gruel, bland but filling. There wasn’t much else to do afterwards. Not by staying in one place. Facing the prospect of a day as flat as the Powder Lakes, Max did as he had the previous night and went walking. Through the tangles of populated corridors, he found the lift that led outside.

The sun was bleaching-bright, and he stuck to the shade at the base of the buttes. Rounding a ridge, the first thing he saw was Toast the Knowing rapidly loading a shotgun.

She brought the barrel back, raised the gun to her shoulder, and aimed towards a rock wall where human outlines had been scratched. She glanced at the gray-haired woman standing beside her, and when the Vuvalini nodded, Toast pulled the trigger.

She shattered chips of stone around the faceless head. Her aim wasn’t perfectly centered, but then it didn’t have to be. Taking away half the skull like that was the kind of shot that killed someone before they realized anything was wrong.

Toast stepped back and the Vuvalini turned to the next student, a young woman with hair in complicated braids and an admirably plump build. “Ready, Iris?”

As Iris completed the annihilation of the etched figure, her classmates stirred, seemingly eager for their turns. They were a mixture of women, both Citadel and former Wretched; young boys who would have once been War Pups; and even a few men who, like Toast’s attendants the day before, might be former War Boys or from the Wretched or a mix of both, though whatever their pasts they seemed in perfect harmony with the others. The Vuvalini had in any case found them worthy of teaching.

Her eyes met Max’s and widened in recognition. He nodded to her, respectful yet unsure how intimate to make the greeting. She had been the one to hold the transfusion needle steady in his arm; she knew his name because she’d overheard it, but never offered her own. They knew each other by sight and by what they each had done.

And what Max had done, the plan he put forward… It had led to the death of all but one of her sisters. He didn’t think she held it against him—he would have known when she helped him give Furiosa his blood. And, oddly, he didn’t think the others wanted revenge either. It had been a hard day, and each one of them knew that. They had made their own choice to ride along with it. He still heard their voices sometimes, but they didn’t accuse.

His right arm prickled. Maybe it mattered that he had saved at least one that day. Not that Furiosa was just a symbol, a stand-in for everyone else he had ever tried to help. She was something more than that, and saving her had felt, in a way he didn’t understand, as instinctive as saving himself. He still didn’t know what that meant. For a long time he hadn’t thought it mattered. He had never planned to see her again. Whatever had appeared inside him, had broken out from inside him, had more to do with himself than with her—she couldn’t know, she wasn’t responsible, any more than he was responsible for the deaths of those who decided to go along with his insane idea—but Max didn’t think he was capable of nurturing whatever that was on his own. It should have vanished, ended, gone.

Following her teacher’s gaze, Toast came up to him. She slung the shotgun in its harness over her back. “Not bad, huh?” she said, her voice a mixture of cocky and soft.

He nodded, offering a thumbs-up.

A smile, small by her standards and again as soft as it was brash, twitched at her lips. Her eyes darted up to see his reaction as she said, “Sometimes you have to make sure your ammunition counts.”

It felt strangely good to be teased again, but he only angled one eyebrow and asked, “You finished?”

She snorted. “With training? Yeah, for today. Would you like me to show you around?”

“If you—If I could—If there’s anything, anything useful…” Furiosa had said yesterday that they could have used him. Maybe it was too late for that, but he wanted to make the offer.

“Why?” Toast asked. From her odd expression, he half expected her to suggest more shooting lessons would be useful. He wasn’t just anticipating her jokes but making them up for her, too.

But she said only, “You’re a guest.” As if that explained everything.

Maybe it did. He wasn’t sure what it meant to be a guest of the Citadel, or anywhere else, for that matter.

“We could go up to the garage,” she suggested.

He nodded and let her lead. He was learning his way about the Citadel little by little, mostly by being guided.

The garage was high up in the butte but looked as if it could have been deep underground. Ventilation shafts through the thick stone walls brought in air but no light. That was provided by torches and electric lamps. Metal on metal echoed through the space, which was so broad the ceiling looked lower than it was. They passed a wall hung with wheels—reverence was obvious in the arrangement, but there was no need any longer for a V8 altar. Most of the wheels looked new, which wasn’t a surprise given the toll the Fury Road had taken on the Immortan’s fleet. Max could have directed them to an old woman with plenty of salvaged parts to spare, but the offer would be unnecessary and the reminder probably unwelcome.

Revheads gathered around various hubs of work throughout the chamber, doing everything from welding to filling tires with a hand pump. The cars they worked on were probably also new, or as new as anything ever was anymore. They looked different—still spiked with defensive barbs, still armed and armored, but with far fewer skulls in evidence and much more color. Toast and Max came around a water tank that had been painted with the image of a moonrise over a lake. Many of the other vehicles had been painted like her truck, with patterns that would blend with the dust and sand.

Yet towards the back of the hall, he saw something so familiar it made his heart jump in his throat. Toast followed as he approached it, waving off a blackthumb who might have intercepted them. It wasn’t a secret—nothing so big could be—but he understood why they wouldn’t want strangers hanging around.

But he wasn’t exactly a stranger.

She was tall and powerful and as perfectly black as crow feathers. He couldn’t see into her with his feet on the ground, but he looked up, catching glimpses through the windows. Enough to see that the ceiling wasn’t patterned with gilt. That there was a broad leather back seat and plenty of shadows where weapons might be hidden. On the driver’s-side door, someone had etched the outline of an arm—not skeletal but mechanical, with rods and pistons and metal wires.

Toast looked between Max and the new Rig, grinning. “We’ll be taking her out soon.” At something in his expression, she added, “She’s a trading Rig.”

He supposed she meant to reassure him that they weren’t about to go to war. Not that trading was much less dangerous or automatically less violent. Even the War Rig had been loaded with trade goods along with everything else. That made it a target.

But he’d been a target when he was nothing but a feral stray. Everything, everyone was a target in the Wasteland. Worrying over it was new to him. Somewhere he’d got the idea that they could be safe here at the Citadel, and that they should be safe.

He should know better. He did know better. He turned away.

He glanced, once, over his shoulder. Whatever her precious cargo, the new Rig didn’t really look like a target, and certainly not like prey. She was too strong for that.

They found his vehicle near the front of the garage, near the lift that had hauled it up. The paint, which he thought was originally red, had faded to patches of pink with highlights of rust. The mechanic with the braided hair scooted out from under it as they approached.

“Pedestrians!” The shouted greeting would have been a deadly insult in other parts of the world, but here seemed meant as a friendly ribbing at worst. Toast rolled her eyes.

“Well, it’s coming along,” was the report, punctuated by grunts and a wrench tightening bolts. “Four days, I said? It’s not coming any faster.”

Max shrugged, not expecting better news.

“What about you?” This was directed at Toast. “Are you still teaching that clever redhead how to drive?”

She leaned against the door. “Sure thing. Should I teach you next?”

Laughter spat like a throttle. “Did you just come here to take up more of my time?”

“Sure we did. And to show Max around.”

The mechanic’s head came out from under the car once more, eyes wide. “Max, huh?”

“The only one I know,” Toast said blandly.

The wide eyes blinked. “Well, that explains why he was with Furiosa.” Her name was pronounced with the weight and reverence of a title. Max shifted, feeling some of that aura might be rubbing off on him, and not comfortable with the thought of his own name taking on such a weight or worse. Becoming a reason for eyes widening, a legend.

But then the mechanic was moving back under the axle, making a low grunt that maybe suggested _the_ Max could have rolled in on a better car. “By the way, we found some stuff in here. Hidden under the seats, over the doors, like that. Should I have it brought to your room?”

He nodded, then, realizing he wouldn’t be seen, said, “Yeah.” The guns he had kept very well hidden, enough that he suspected the blackthumb crew hadn’t found all of them. The other things were either scrap or spares of spares. Two extra medical kits, on top of the two he always carried with him. Even now, clipped to his jacket like a badge or a talisman, was a tight-coiled cannula.

“Speaking of the redhead,” Toast said, “I have to join them soon.” She gestured towards the garage gate with a jerk of her head, and with the tip of one booted foot she tapped the mechanic’s arm companionably. “Pleasure talking to you, as always, greasemouth.”

“You too, Knowing.”

“I’d like to bring you with me,” she told Max as they left the garage, “and most of them would be glad to let you in, but one or two…” She shrugged. “The Water Mothers can be territorial.”

“Okay.” He’d already decided he didn’t want to go anywhere he’d only be welcomed on the basis of his name, his history. “I can wait.”

She turned down a corridor that narrowed as they went along it. The light ahead grew brighter, until he realized it was an opening in the cliff face. A narrow bridge stretched from it to the opposite butte. The one with the waterfall.

Up on this level, he could see directly across to it. The stone had been carved above—faintly he could see the remnants of the Immortan’s old logo. The skull had been replaced by a tree, the teeth of its upper jaw turned into roots. The lower set had been transformed, with a simple style that obvious care kept from being crude, into the shapes of four women. They were large, broad, and though their faces were only serene suggestions, their heads were covered with hatchmarks suggesting complicated braids. The Water Mothers.

Living figures stood around them, wrapped in white robes and more colorful fabric. He thought he could make out one, tall and thin with metal at her left side. Next to her, a woman with vivid red braids.

Toast turned to him before stepping onto the bridge. “I’ll see you around. You can go anywhere, so long as nobody tries to stop you. Did you see the tunnel we passed?”

“No.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “That was the point. But it’s there. You might want to check it out.”

He watched her stride across the bridge, deftly swaying with it. Then he went back the way they’d come. Carefully checking the walls, he found the tunnel half-hidden behind a gurgling water pipe. It connected the garage with…somewhere else. He stepped inside and found the floor slanted gently but steadily upward. The air in it smelled shadowed, but not unpleasant; faintly damp.

The unusual smell grew stronger as he continued, as did the moisture. Illumination bled in from both ends and from a faint strip of electrical lighting in the ceiling. The walls were bare but scratched in places, as if something had been carried that was almost too large to fit between them. Cargo, maybe, to the Rigs in the garage. Precious cargo that had to be loaded in secret.

He remembered what the War Rig had carried the last time, officially and in secret, and Toast’s seeming familiarity with this tunnel, and he had some idea of what lay at the end of it.

Not that anyone could ever be prepared.

He stepped out of the tunnel into what could have been open air, except the large room was stiller that the face of a butte should be. The rock walls ended and above them soared an iron frame holding sheets of glass. Sunlight added warmth to the wetness, enough that a trickle of sweat started under Max’s jacket, but humidity was such an unbelievable luxury that it didn’t feel uncomfortable. Only shocking.

He breathed in; beyond the closeness of the tunnel, the atmosphere smelled fresh and sweetly sharp. _Green._ Green was a smell, was a quality of the moisture and light. It filled his eyes. Aisle upon aisle of green, blooming from pots and stone-edged beds on the floor, sprouting from staggered rows of hanging planters.

He moved between them, part of him wanting to drink in the sight and part of him afraid to. Not knowing what to do with it, as if he was worthy of having anything to do with it. Fearing he might damage something if he wasn’t careful. But it was stranger than that. Because he felt almost as if _it_ might damage _him_ , that something this unexpected and precious and wonderful could only be dangerous. That the awesome could become awful.

When he swallowed, his throat felt tight from his pulse hammering in it. And then, behind him—

“Welcome to the Green Place,” a voice said with friendly and familiar irony.

A branch brushed Max’s shoulder as he turned around.

The Dag wasn’t quite as thin as she had been, filling out around her face and limbs, though she was still possessed of a kind of gangly grace. Her clothing was a colorful patchwork with a sleeveless jacket thrown over, and her braided hair held bone and clay beads and even a few polished-iron nuts. A limp but vibrant green spring had been tucked behind one ear. Her hands were filled with a basket of more springs. With a satisfied smile at him, she reached up to pluck another from the vines.

As she moved on down the row, she glanced his way until he fell in beside her.

“You can pick anything you want, so long as it’s ripe and you don’t take all of it.” Over her shoulder, she added, “The ripe ones are colorful. Red and dark blue, usually. Or here, try this.” She pulled down a cluster of waxy yellow stringlike pods.

Between his teeth, the pulp held a pleasant wet crunch and hard-to-identify taste, not savory but far from bland.

“So are you staying here now?”

His shoulders rose and fell, although she hadn’t turned to see him. “A few days.”

“She told us you’d come back. Said the rest was up to you. Like always. We thought… _She_ thought…We weren’t expecting you to go like that, after everything.” The Dag bent to check the soil around the roots of a vine growing from one of the lower-hanging troughs. When she straightened, she said, “She only agreed in the first place because you said we’d do it _together_.”

She was silent then, but only because she was intent on her work; she didn’t seem to expect a reply. Her words hadn’t been sharpened into an accusation. Their barbs were only there if he let them catch him.

It wasn’t that they had needed him to rebuild the Citadel. Furiosa had said simply, _We could have used you._ And of course they could; they could use anybody. No one carried dead weight in the Wasteland.

And of course they had done it together; there was no other way.

But afterwards... Aside from his blood—and he remembered how her fingers now gently plucking dead leaves had handled the tubing as red flowed through it, had held the needle secure in Furiosa’s skin—after that, he had nothing else to give, nothing else that only he could provide. Maybe he was clinging to that. To the fact that they hadn’t needed him: by leaving, he hadn’t failed them. And he didn’t need to stay this time, either.

Still, he felt the suspicion, stung by something her words. That by leaving he had let them down. Left unfulfilled some part of a bargain. Not one they couldn’t survive without; not one they couldn’t forgive him for. Unfinished all the same.

He looked around the room, the Green Place. “You’re okay here.” Almost a question.

“Oh, yeah.” She came up smiling. “Some of these were growing when we got back, but lots are from Keep’s collection. Some are still sprouting…” Now they were headed towards the back wall, a sheet of stone dark beneath the glass windows. A circular hole in it was shielded by a fabric curtain. It took him some moments to find the vault’s former door and realize what it had been, because now the thick metal disk had been overturned on the floor and transformed into a sort of worktable. Ceramic and battered metal pots held green seedlings and were surrounded by a scattering of spilled soil.

The Dag knelt at the table and started filling another tin canister, taking up a small scoop to transfer soil and seeds. Her basket of clippings rested at her side as if forgotten for now. It seemed to suit her, doing more than one thing at once, even too many to keep track of.

The curtain swung open. A dark-haired head emerged, looking to the Dag and then in his direction. “Oh! Hello.”

Cheedo went to the Dag first, setting her hands to her cheeks and drawing her close for a kiss. The casual intimacy flowed too naturally to startle him, and in hindsight he could see that of course these were the two who would find each other. He felt glad for both of them.

The surprise came because if he bothered to think about it—and he hadn’t, for thousands of days—he wouldn’t have believed romantic love survived the death of the world. Maybe it hadn’t in its old form. Maybe it was being reinvented. But this was his first reminder that it had ever existed.

Then Cheedo was coming up to him, looking him over. She came to a stop well within arm’s reach. Max caught himself stiffening, bracing for a hug. Meeting— _friends_ —was almost too much, as he had feared it would be. But maybe the youngest of the five women was still a little shy of him, or maybe she noticed him growing tense, because instead she only stood there and smiled. “Hello, Max.”

“Hey,” he said. Smiling back.

She turned to the Dag. “I was going to take a walk around. Stretch my legs.”

“Want me to come with you?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure if you’d rather take a book.” It was said completely without rancor, instead with the air of a private, joking rivalry. Between herself and the books, presumably Cheedo’s two great loves. “Or are books what you want to get away from for a change?”

Maybe Cheedo answered with a smile; Max couldn’t see her expression. She wore a knee-length dress and an embroidered vest over it, but the vest left her arms and some of her shoulders bare. On her skin he could see writing, dense text in a firm hand, the ink a rich blue-black.

Cheedo darted back into the old vault and did emerge with two books, their pages turning ochre with age but otherwise preserved. _Books._ Although she handled them carefully, it was obvious she had been surrounded by them for so long that she took them for granted. She put them on the ground before the curtain and said, “Satisfy will know these are hers if she drops by.”

“I think the Water Mothers are still meeting,” the Dag said, and seemed a little surprised when Max nodded.

“Toast showed me,” he said. “Not that I, uh, joined them.”

“Even you probably wouldn’t be invited.” She added, “We are. But the sprouts needed replanting and Cheedo had her booklend requests—”

“And the story about the First Spring,” she added softly, brushing her fingers down along her left arm. The skin there hadn’t been tattooed yet, but a smear of pigment remained—perhaps from a practice run?

Her right arm above the elbow had been filled in.

“Knowing your name,” the Dag said, “has saved her a _lot_ of space.”

He stared at Cheedo. She nodded and tapped just above her collar bone on her right side. “It’s all there.”

Maybe the Dag was exaggerating. There couldn’t be more than one or two places for his name in such a story. And even that felt excessive; he wasn’t sure what to make of being immortalized on someone’s skin. A History Woman’s skin. Cheedo wouldn’t remember him just out of affection—he didn’t think. But it was her story, more her story than his; more all of theirs than his. They’d made him a part of it.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You can come with us,” the Dag said. “Why don’t we see the roof? Unless you’re afraid of heights?”

He started to shake his head, then nodded, then at last had to resort to, “Let’s do that.”

Cheedo walked beside him up a staircase carved into the stone wall across the Green Place. In a low voice, she said, “Is it okay? That we used your name? I can take it out if you want.”

“It’s okay.”

Pipes brought water up to the flat tops of the buttes. Trees with long, frondlike leaves and heavy clusters of fruit rose around them, bobbing in a stiff, warm wind. There was a pool surrounded by low benches where a few figures lay resting, while others were at work trimming, planting, watering, harvesting. Rows of plants presumably hardy enough to endure the desert exposure covered the rest of the surface.

It was another world, right to the cliff’s edge. He heard the distant hum of the waterfall over one side, the side Cheedo and the Dag approached in a way that made it obvious they had no fear of heights. He followed more slowly. Greenery rustled around his feet.

Leaves and wood. This was what had burned in his dreams. There was no danger of that now. He made himself look at the basin of water and imagine the many figures around dipping into it, pouring buckets on flames. They could save themselves.

He couldn’t protect them.

It was easier to accept when he walked alongside them, when he could see for himself how well they looked and how little they needed his protection. That should be refreshing; usually he didn’t like having to protect people, getting entangled in their problems. He preferred to go his own way.

He wondered what they thought he could have helped build that would be better than this. How could they have used him? Maybe that was why he wanted to protect them; at least it was something he could do.

Cheedo turned back as if to check on him, and he nodded to her as he caught up. Considering how much walking he’d done today, his leg was holding up well. She stepped aside to make space for him at the edge.

They looked down over it: the waterfall, the river, the growing town between the buttes. The waters ran at full force today. Women still milled on the platform. He could make out Toast standing beside the bright-haired figure of Capable. On her other side was a Water Mother he recognized as Iris, and next to Capable, Furiosa had tipped her head back to speak to one of the few women taller than herself.

From the corner of his eye he realized the Dag and Cheedo were watching him watch her. Whatever they expected to see, they didn’t seem disappointed.

Then Cheedo turned her head towards another woman who stood farther along the platform. “There’s Satisfy. With Golden Eyes.”

“Now _her_ I’m expecting.” The Dag sounded almost impatient. “Manyplenty told me they’d be visiting today.”

“They don’t seem to be done yet. I know they were talking about taking water trucks through the Power Lakes, and Toast went up to explain what she saw there…besides you,” she added to Max.

He nodded, then asked, “Should I leave? Before your visit?”

The two women looked at each other and something passed between them in silence, enough that he wasn’t sure if he’d offended them.

“It looks like it’s still a while before they come over,” the Dag said. “We’re not going to chase you off.”

“But it will be the first time Seed sees the Green Place,” Cheedo added.

“Seed?”

“Keeper of the Seeds is a big name for a kid to grow into,” the Dag said. “Manyplenty’s hopeful. Guess I am, too. Wouldn’t have given that name if I wasn’t.”

Max realized he was staring, but didn’t know what to do with his eyes while he thought her words through. “A…kid.”

“I guess I never mentioned it.” Her smile was small, a little tight, but genuine. “The kid’s mine. Sort of. Manyplenty and Golden Eyes took Seed to mother. They wanted one, and I…it’s easier for all of us.”

She hadn’t mentioned, at least not in his hearing. Why would she? He was a stranger, not someone to trust with that kind of information. He’d never guessed. Children weren’t something he thought of. And now the reminder of them—should he be glad for her? It seemed like the matter had been too difficult for her to be simply glad. But in some ways it was like the reminder of love that her and Cheedo’s kiss had been. And perhaps also like the reminder of the Green Place—joyous and unsettling all at once. _Keeper of the Seeds._ What a legacy that child could have.

“I should leave you to it,” Max said. “Don’t want to interrupt. But…good luck.”

The Dag nodded. “Thanks.”

As the Water Mothers’ meeting on the platform below broke up, the three of them turned and headed back through the rooftop garden to the stairs. The Dag threw an arm across Cheedo’s shoulders. As her fingers curved around the armhole of the vest, he saw the tattoos on her knuckles and how they matched the style of the marks on Cheedo’s skin.

They were slowing down, giving him the chance to catch up. Cheedo shrugged off the vest and draped it on her left arm. The writing, the History, was clearer now.

She and the Dag took turns reading from it aloud.

It was a good story. A true one, told simply, with a power of its own. He was surprised how well his name fit into the flow of it, the few times he was mentioned. Most of it was about Furiosa. And the five women—their voices grew softer on Angharad’s name. There was another History Woman named Miss Giddy, and she was written with Angharad together on Cheedo’s shoulder.

As she shifted, turning to show one part or another of the story, bracelets rattled on her forearms. Beads of clay and bone and glass and metal. One seemed to be made of seed pods.

“They’re from the Vuvalini,” she said.

“But Cheedo made up a use for them on her own.”

“They’re… _memonics,_ ” she said, pronouncing the word carefully. “For things that aren’t part of the history, or make their own story.”

The Dag tapped the seedpods. “Planting instructions. Depth to dig, three seeds for three knuckles…how many seeds to a hole, four…drops of water to a seed, ten…the space between the holes, two. See?”

Another bracelet was a mixture of ancient beads that he thought at first were bone but turned out to be white plastic. Black letters were painted on them. Missing letters were made of painted clay beads. Cheedo turned it letter by letter for him to follow. _W-e-a-r-e-n-o-t-t-h-i-n-g-s._

“Does yours mean anything?” she asked then.

He clasped the cord bracelet as if to hide it under his fingers. Not that he wanted to hide it from them; the movement was pure instinct. “Not like yours does.”

“Did someone make it for you?”

“No.” He swallowed, said, “I made it—for…”

Her face. Indistinct and nameless but _hers._ Not threatening in the way his other ghosts had been, but even more dangerous. He pushed back as she rose, tried to force the memory away. He could do it sometimes, if the circumstances were right and he had the will to spare.

Today he could.

But not before a fading whisper, his own— _Let me show you how it works._ And slender fingers, clever, tightening it against his wrist. The feeling of security. If there was more than that—

“Don’t worry about Cheedo,” the Dag was saying. “She collects stories now.”

She did, and she shared more of them as they returned to the Green Place. Although she had always struck him as the shiest of the women, having something to speak about, something that had nothing to do with her or any of them, seemed to help. She had read about much more than she’d ever seen in the 6,400 days of her life, but she had also done enough for several lifetimes—the words over her arms and shoulders recorded that—and from the Wretched and travelers who had received the new Citadel’s hospitality.

Maybe she hoped he would tell her some. It wasn’t that Max didn’t want to, but he wasn’t sure where to start. Or what she should hear. She wasn’t naïve, but many of his stories didn’t make cheerful telling.

He still found ways to protect, after all.

Cheedo pulled her vest back on. As she did, she smeared a last remnant of ink along her left arm.

Rubbing at it, she said to Max, “Practice, to make sure everything fits. Although we have ways to erase a tattoo, if it goes on wrong or needs to be changed. Salt, and heat—it hurts a little, but it works, and…”

He remembered her offer to take out his name, but that wasn’t what she was getting at. “Would you like to—your back…?”

She had helped free the prisoners in the blood bank; of course she knew about the label. Maybe she’d helped scrub them from other former blood bags.

“They can also be marked over, fixed into something…better.”

He did think about it. If only for an instant. “Thank you, but it’s okay.”

He didn’t care how he looked—he knew it was awful. Yet he remembered Furiosa helping to trim his hair the night before, how she looked over his face as if she saw something there. How her hand had run over his back without flinching, gentle but indifferent to his scars.

More importantly, he wasn’t sure how long it might take to recover from the procedure, and he would be leaving in four days.

“But thanks,” he said again.

They stopped at the mouth of the tunnel that led by the garages. “Well, you’re welcome,” Cheedo said. “And welcome here, I mean.”

The Dag added, “Anytime. The door’s not locked.”

**#**

He went back to the green chamber that night. Walked the rows between leaves and roots, his footsteps so quiet even he couldn’t hear them. The green had turned black, and the stars were like dust scattered across the windows. Water dripped somewhere with an echoing chime. Between the thick growth and the night sky, he could have been standing in a garden or a forest in the old world. He could no longer be certain if he had seen those gardens, even planted them, or if he just remembered them vividly from secondhand stories, from rumor, from myth.

They seemed familiar—the green was familiar, the bobbing of thin, supple branches in the breeze stirred as he passed them, the tang of growth that filled the air. Distant, but intimately familiar, like something he had consciously forgotten but which part of him still remembered. Maybe somewhere underneath the ghosts, the nightmares. Once he had been surrounded by green, by growth. And he had not been alone. There was a memory of that, too. Of someone—a woman… Or was that also someone else’s story?

He let his fingers trail over waxy leaves and crisp ones, traced fat veins wrinkling the green surfaces. He felt the bulbs of roots swelling in the damp soil and the soft globes of ripening fruit. These were real, and he was here to feel them. Breathing deep, he smelled mellow or spicy-sweet scents rising from the flowers, but he didn’t touch those. The petals seemed too flimsy, too fragile. Even having the thought of it was odd—most things in the Wasteland were better left untouched. He didn’t know why he felt so open now, so ready to extend his hands.

As the Dag had invited him to, he picked what looked ripe—just a taste, here and there. Strange and sweet, not much like the bland and filling food he’d come to expect at best. Eating was something done to sustain life, and it could be as hard work as finding something to eat in the first place. For him it had become automatic: find, chew, swallow. The tongue was just a muscle to aid in that task. If anything, flavor was an unpleasant side effect, bitter or sour. But here it could be a source of curiosity. Even pleasure.

The smooth skin of a tomato gave way beneath his teeth in a burst of juice. Memory flooded back at the flavor; it had been a long time since he’d eaten one. The flesh was more savory, firm and moist, with seeds floating in their mellow jelly. It spilled over so that he had to lick his lips, mop his chin with the back of a hand. Before he left, he picked two more to carry with him out of a foraging instinct, a survivor’s habit. You didn’t walk away from food empty-handed if you could help it.

And maybe there was another unconscious need, to bring some of the gardens with him. To have proof that they were there, that something like them could still exist.

Partway down the narrow tunnel that Toast had shown him, the sight of the main corridor was eclipsed by another figure. They didn’t seem to see or hear him, or if they did it didn’t slow their approach. He only hoped there would be enough space to move around each other.

The figure turned to let him slide past, and as she did the light reached the side of her face. It fell on his, too. If she was surprised to see him here, Furiosa didn’t show it. He wasn’t surprised to see her anywhere in the Citadel anymore. This even seemed like a logical place to patrol—between the garage and the gardens, two important and vulnerable chambers. And she knew better than most how this passage could be overlooked.  

She might have other reasons, too, for visiting the Green Place in the quiet of night, but he didn’t want to pry. Privacy became suddenly, incongruously important as they were crushed against each other. Ever since his time in a bloodbag’s cage Max had been uneasy about enclosed spaces, and having to share this one made it feel even more enclosed than before. Still, it wasn’t bad to share it with her. Furiosa kept herself flat to the wall, but she didn’t drop her gaze or point it past him, didn’t pretend he wasn’t there. For some reason it helped that they didn’t need to try to ignore each other.

Their eyes met as he moved by and he stopped. No longer chest to chest, they remained there. He could feel her leg touching his. Compared to the wall his spine pressed against, she felt warm, and almost soft.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

 “Not before. I think I will now.”

“Good.”

She didn’t turn away; he didn’t feel her even gathering herself to turn away, although he knew she would soon.

Until he saw her, he hadn’t realized how long it seemed since he last did. Since the last time he’d looked into her eyes without any distance between them. He wasn’t surprised to come across her because on some level he was expecting to, or hoping to. He’d missed seeing her.

“I was in the gardens,” he said, although that was obvious; speaking as a reason not to turn and keep moving himself. “They’re…” _Beautiful_ he thought but didn’t say. An ancient word. Not one many would recognize anymore.

She nodded.

When it would have been right to leave, he had to make himself do it. She took another step down the hall, giving him room. They still faced each other.

 _Beautiful,_ he wanted to say but didn’t. Instead he offered one of the ripe tomatoes, as if illustrating by example. She cupped her hand, taking it carefully as if it were a much more fragile gift. Or as if it were a gift at all—the gardens were after all more hers than his, her people’s at least. The potential awkwardness didn’t register until she’d murmured a quiet good night and continued on her way.

If a mistake, it was more harmless than most. Not as unsettling as the emotion that had stirred through him, the reluctance to go from her. A need and a jolt of recognition—and dizziness, like he was drunk, although he didn’t often resort to intoxication. He didn’t often want to. Some desires—loss of control for one—became too dangerous to want, and so he had stopped. Because he wanted survival more.

And survival became easy, after a while. All a matter of adaptation. Like nausea at the taste of something poisonous or spoiled. There were things he stopped wanting to want.

Some things he wanted so rarely that he hadn’t missed them.

He hadn’t needed the word _beautiful_ in ten thousand days.

He could remember the details of the person who had been with him in that other garden—if he had in fact been there, if it was his story—if he tried. But he didn’t want to try. That was also a survival instinct.

When he’d gone out tonight, he’d just wanted to see the Green Place again. He wasn’t avoiding his bed, although before climbing into it he relit the torch in its niche. The glow through his eyelids was restful.

Drifting, he came up when his body jumped with a familiar jerk—mostly internal, perhaps not even visible from the outside. A struggle he was doomed to lose, even wanted to. Brief crisis at the edge of sleep, the feeling of falling.

Something in his dreams caught him.

A human hand; he felt the fingers curling although he couldn’t say where it held him. The securing touch reached everywhere at once. Every limb was pinned by a single grip. And then others added to it—pulling at his shirt, grasping his wrist, dragging him closer and drawing him back. The struggle was silent, but he thought if any of them said a word he might know the voice. These weren’t strangers. They might not even be enemies.

But he was entangled in them, he was trapped. He should be fighting them off, trying to break free. It should be suffocating. Even though he wasn’t falling anymore, the sheer weight and force of being held was taking him under, and soon he would be so far down that the only thing left was to wake up. And still it didn’t happen.

He turned, twisted, breaking free of the hold even though he didn’t want to, didn’t need to. Because it seemed he should. It just might be safer. For an instant he was free of the touch and plummeting again. It was a fall that didn’t end, that felt more like floating, lost in the caress of water or fingers. The waves became hands again, and his own hands met them. Pressing needles into his skin. A sharp point from which he uncoiled… Still entangled, then, still connected, a red wire linking artery to vein…

The tubing thickened and roughened and became rope, and his hands were bound with it and he was desperate, desperate for something, but not afraid. Aching, but not hurt. Helpless, not even struggling to get loose.

It felt familiar, but that might only be the logic of dreams.

Familiar and unexpected like the Green Place and its sweet growing things had been.

As soon as he thought about dreaming he was free, torchlight flooding his blinking eyes. The only rope on his wrist was the cord bracelet. Curving his hand back, he ran his fingers over it. By pulling one loop he could loosen it enough to take off. By tugging at another he could unravel it completely. His fingers wouldn’t reach that far. They could, but he didn’t want them to. Even if for an instant it felt that he should.

Already he was sinking back down and almost before he closed his eyes the hands returned. Or maybe just a single hand, a single point of contact that was more than enough. It no longer seized Max as if to keep him from falling. It only held on. And he didn’t struggle against the hold. There was no need to free himself or to run. He had no choice and didn’t need one.

He wasn’t smothered or forced or torn. It kept him still. It kept him safe. Holding him in place. Holding him in one piece. And then, very carefully, deliberately, it moved over him. It found the broken places. It found the seams made of his scars and slowly, tenderly, thoroughly, it took him apart.


	4. Third Day: Mapmaking (Part One)

He hadn’t wanted the dream, but it hadn’t had to end so soon. He didn’t know whether to call it a nightmare. Some of it had been, certainly—most of his dreams were—but not all of it. The sensation of being held pushed along his nerves. His wrists almost itched, almost ached, feeling bare. He hadn’t thought about that kind of thing in a thousand days. He hadn’t wanted it in even longer.

There were things you stopped wanting after the end of the world. Or pretended you stopped wanting, that you  had no time or place to want. That you learned to reject from the center of yourself. Wanting was risk, wanting was vulnerability, and wanting to _be_ vulnerable was insane.

But so was he.

The urge wasn’t self-destructive, at least there was that. Too much of him was bent for survival to seek out real harm. It wasn’t for punishment, either—if his guilt could be erased through suffering, it would have happened already. If anything, the experience felt like it might be…rewarding.

To be held. Not having to struggle for survival or anything else. To have all the decisions in someone else’s hands, hands he could trust. To get entangled and for that to be okay. To be trapped, but to feel safe.

And wanting that was even more insane than wanting to be bound. He pushed the dream and its attendant thoughts aside.

This was the two hundred and forty-eighth day since he had walked away from the Citadel. A new record in the number of days he had kept track of consecutively, at least this time around. A new record in the number of days he had survived consecutively. So far as he knew (on some days he didn’t even feel sure of that).

Reminded by the realization, he reached into his jacket for the folded cloth paper of the map. He was sitting at one of the Citadel’s overlooks, with one of the best views of the surrounding territory that could be had. Comparing it to his rough sketches, he found a few details to add, a few corrections to painstakingly make by altering the lines. Where necessary, he erased them with a spit-slick fingertip, staining his skin with ink. But on the whole it was good, accurate enough to use, and evidence that he’d been able to keep track of the land he passed through. Reality had a set shape and he had traced it.

“What are you doing?”

Toast wasn’t interrogating him with the question, merely being, in her own way, friendly. He shifted so she could sit beside him. When she leaned over the map, he resisted a second’s urge to fold it away. It wasn’t private; he just rarely had reason share it with anyone. He’d shown it to Furiosa when it could accomplish what a hundred words couldn’t. When it did what it had done for him so many times: presented the facts, the unchanging shape of the world.

He held the map spread out even when Toast leaned closer to touch it. She tapped the red mark of the Citadel. “So here’s home.”

He nodded.

“We’ll need to change that picture.” As he nodded again, already Toast was digging in her pockets. She came up with a folded square of pale leather, which she opened to reveal designs of embroidered thread in different colors and patterns. He compared them with the shapes on his own map. They matched pretty well. She spread hers out and moved closer to him.

Toast tapped her mark for the Citadel. Home, she had called it. Its symbol was a streaming waterfall in thick white and green thread. He didn’t have the equivalent pigments to redo the red circle on his map, but he could at least get rid of the skull. Which he did, inking in the shape until it was solid. He altered the flames, too, at first sketching idly, until he saw the form he was making.

A compass rose. A long spike pointed north, and others aimed east, west, south. The resemblance to a rose blossom was distant; maybe it would seem more obvious to people who saw flowers often enough. But it was no longer part of the map, at least not obviously—to a casual glance it was a directional symbol, a way to orient everything else. It seemed safer, in case the map ever fell into the wrong hands (which he couldn’t be sure it never would so long as he carried it out there in the Wasteland). And it seemed fitting.

With her fingertip, Toast nudged another symbol to the south. “Gastown?”

Max nodded. Her map contained embroidered X’s to show the place of a few smaller settlements, she explained. As he included those on his own, she looked around the Bullet Farm and Powder Lakes. She pointed to a recently added black spot, an oil smudge as makeshift as the town it indicated. “This was where we met.”

“Yes,” he said.

“What’s this here?” she asked, gesturing to a shape farther down the line.

“Another camp.” He’d gotten directions there, in exchange for water and a cupful of gasoline, but they hadn’t had much else to trade. “They might have moved on by now.”

From another pocket she took out a black stick. He recognized it as charcoal when she used it to make a mark, filling in the spot a short day west of the border town. “I won’t sew it in for now.” She looked over his map again. “And this?” 

She had plenty of detail surrounding the Citadel and the settlements reached by its roads, but past a day’s journey her map became sparser. She had the mountains, a canyon marked with a long-haired figure on a motorcycle, gray lines of marsh beyond it with vertical interruptions he recognized after a moment as the skeletons of trees, undulating orange dunes past that, and then the lines of a tower with irregular white sparks adorning its top. Beyond that, the bareness of the salt flats. All around, the map was empty leather, the plains of silence.

“That was an old refinery,” he said, following her gaze to a symbol on the edge of his own map. “Might not be in use anymore.” Looking to a spot farther north—“That’s a guess. Knew some people headed that way. I never made it out that far myself.”

Toast shrugged and added it in charcoal anyway. Even hearsay, she seemed to think, was more knowledge than she had before. He was glad to give it to her. He wasn’t sure of his reasons—if she was planning another journey, a young road warrior ranging even farther afield…

She’d bent her head over her map, and the ridge of her scar made a shadow on the skin below it. If she went out there, she could earn more than one modest scar. Sooner or later, everyone did. For some they were a point of pride, records of their favorite stories. Hers could be; what she had already was. She’d got it when she helped bring down a tyrant.

It wouldn’t make sense for him to be proud of her, Max thought. It had nothing to do with him; he’d just been, quite literally, along for the ride. Or for him to feel a sense of—not possession, but investment, watching her add the information from his map to her own record. That it mattered to him that she had access to this knowledge. That it made a difference, beyond the practical contribution.

Entanglement again. It was his own fault. He’d said something about _together_ and they’d taken him at his word. Along for the ride, wherever it went. Not just in geographic measures.

She tapped the mark of the border town again, then traced south. “The first time we met,” she said, following her own line of thought, “past the Buzzards.” Spikes of rust-colored thread, with red marks sewn around them in a notation Max guessed delimited them to historical interest rather than a current warning. “After the storm.”

“Two hundred and forty eight days ago,” he said. She looked at him, then nodded. So he’d had the number right after all. It was comforting to have it confirmed.

And with that—knowing just how distant it was, in time, in space on a map—it was as if nothing divided present from past at all. Not like a nightmare, except in its vividness. The horror, which had certainly been there at the time, no longer touched him. It had been erased by more than the passage of days.

So he could remember cold metal against his jaw or cheek, the buzzing in his right ear that still hadn’t died, the crack of a blow across his muzzled face, without being lost in the terror of it. It must have hurt, but he didn’t feel that anymore, either. It was a different sensation that lit up his body and mind. Movements synchronized even while in opposition, evenly matched, while he watched it unfold as if in a vision, able to anticipate exactly what she would do.

And then, beyond even anticipation… He felt her strength thrown against him, the chain wrapped at his neck. The pure physical realization of being under her control, at her mercy. In the moment it was terrifying. Now, with the perspective of distance, knowing he was safe, and knowing her, it was…different.

_Don’t breathe._

He’d forgotten how to trust someone but he had known he could let her do anything, give her anything without regretting it. It wasn’t just a relief. As if he found some contentment at putting himself in her hands.

And when she’d been exsanguinated under his hands and he’d had to cut the breath back into her and bleed the life back into her and when he gave her his name, knowing she might take it with her if she died, so that they would both lose everything—

“Hm?” Toast prompted. She was watching him steadily, not impatient, but maybe a little concerned.

He shook his head, shook off everything that couldn’t be captured in drawings on paper. “What?”

Her finger drifted on the map. He guessed at distance; maybe forty klicks northwest from where they had met, Toast had made a mark. Like the others, it had been stitched, the thread dyed with yellow clay. The color set it off, unique.

“I think we used to go this way often.” Continuing something she had said while he got lost in his mind; it wasn’t that she hadn’t noticed him drifting, not from the way she had looked, but he guessed this was the easier way to her to tell it. Starting from the middle because it would be too hard to share the beginning again. “A whole caravan, I think sixteen cars and five motorcycles. I got on the back of one once. Taller than I was, I still remember. We had guns in every car, crossbows. And we could move fast. Nothing ever bothered us, until…” Her head shook, but her hand on the map went very still. “They looked like another caravan to me. Bigger than us. Biggest thing I’d ever seen, besides a storm.”

“You were…stolen,” he said, remembering what Furiosa had said about herself.

“Yeah. Almost a thousand days ago now. Right here was the last I saw of any of them.”

He studied the map with her. He’d been across the Powder Lakes that way, but couldn’t say for sure if he’d passed the exact spot. Shaking memory down, he tried to find anything he’d have seen. If they’d all died there, if an entire caravan and a score of vehicles had been wiped out, there would still be shrapnel in the sand a thousand days later, rusted bits nobody could scavenge, bits of desiccated bone cleaned by scavengers.

“I didn’t see anything they left behind,” he told her.

Toast nodded. “I know we had a route. I remember that much. Wandering the desert like we were supposed to—there was a joke or a saying or something, forty years in the desert for us, again. Maybe they moved farther east after the attack. But they must still be out there. I’ll find them.” She pulled a long splinter from her belt pouch and began to chew it. “I just want to know how they’re doing.”

She would, Max thought. As she went out into the Wasteland, a Road Warrior, she was serving the Citadel’s interests—her own interests, in her new home—but also searching out this old one, and if anyone could do it, she could. Like Furiosa had. But one thousand days wasn’t as long as seven thousand; a caravan wasn’t the Green Place; and for the young women, he could hope.

He pointed to the map. “It’s a good start.”

“Must have been easier in the old days. People use to track each other—themselves, too—by satellite. Gee-pee-ess. Miss Giddy told us.” The memory seemed to strike off a thought. “We should share this with my wives,” Toast said with the flash of a smirk at a shared joke. “In the library.”

He followed her there, through the narrow tunnel and across the hanging gardens of the Green Place. With a shouted hello, she pushed back the curtain that served as a door to the vault and they climbed inside. The space beyond was filled with light—sunlight from the glass ceiling and buzzing electric light from a collection of ancient lamps—and the scent of old, dry paper. Books covered the shelves and were stacked on the floor when there weren’t any more of those. In a back room, two bedframes had been turned into tables to hold more volumes, including more than half of an encyclopedia. There was enough space above the stacks of books to reveal the words in white paint: _We Are Not Things_.

More words over the door and wrapping around a pool of water surrounded by piles of cushions covered in quilted scraps and rubber-leather from busted tires. Cheedo gestured to Max and he went cautiously onto one beside her, stretching out his left leg.

Toast explained what they were there for and she and the Dag began to pull books from the walls. Toast dragged folding chairs over with a screech of metal on concrete. Cheedo used the one in front of her as a desk. She flipped through books to the blank endpages, some of which had already been filled with handwriting. When she found an empty one, she pulled Toast’s map closer and began to copy it. The Dag was doing something similar, with her drawing superimposed over the illustration in another book. She made a satisfied sound as the images seemed to match up, then continued, filling in the edges of the ancient map.

All the while they were talking. Max found it hard to follow—the sheer volume of words became overwhelming, and they included Citadel slang along with stranger terms, ones they seemed to have developed among each other. Others were pronounced oddly. _Arroyo_ became _arrow-yo_ as Cheedo asked him about a route. He was impressed that she even recognized it, and the Dag flipped through the geography textbook in her lap before asking another question.

Toast was suddenly above him, sitting backwards on one of the chairs. Red hair appeared beside her as Capable came through from the tunnel settled on another cushion.

Max had almost no experience on reunions, even if the past two days had been full of them. Her eyes moved over him, taking him in at a glance, which he returned. Her hair fell free in the back and around her face it hung in finer braids like the Water Mothers’. Tools and beads chimed at her belt. Among them were keys, so rusted that their purpose must be decorative, and a worn-looking file. To look at her was to see her transforming the Citadel at its heart—freeing slaves, converting soldiers. Not changed so much herself except, maybe, to be even more what she always had been.

During the two hundred days he’d been away from them, Max had not always been sure his mind hadn’t made the young women up. What they did, what they stood for, what they accomplished, shouldn’t have been possible in the Wasteland. What they had helped _him_ to accomplish—it should all have been impossible.

Capable smiled at him, then turned away to accept another book from Cheedo. “How did the visit go yesterday?”

“It was good!” Cheedo exclaimed. The Dag grinned behind her and added, “Manyplenty wanted us to say all the names of the plants. The kid’s too young to know what we’re talking about, but it can’t hurt to listen.”

Toast unfolded the map on her knee and began to trace a route on it with one fingertip, her eyes narrowing in concentration. The expression lingered as they continued working. It didn’t ease out until Capable tapped her hand and asked something in a low voice.

Toast took something from her pocket and gave it to her. A few moments later, a low chime started from Capable’s fingers as they turned the miniature crank of the music box. Toast’s chin began to rock to the tune.

“It helps me think,” she said when she noticed Max watching her. “Don’t know why, but it does. We could stop if it’s bothering you.”

“No.” In his right ear, the tinny notes mixed oddly with the omnipresent buzzing, but not unpleasantly. When he turned his head so the sound came from his left, the effect became stranger. It had been so long since he heard music that wasn’t roaring or pounding, meant to set hearts and engines racing. This was sweet. Calming. It didn’t exactly help him concentrate; part of him wanted to put everything down and just listen, hearing the tune to the end.

They continued without him anyway, leaning together to discuss whether the sand dunes on his map were the same as the ones in the book in the Dag’s lap, spreading several dozen kilometers northward. Toast left her chair to grab another book. Capable put the music box down. As the discussion faded, one of her hands reached out to trace the words written around the pool’s edge.

“Her words,” she said softly. _Our children will not be warlords._ The Dag’s eyes traced them, too.

Capable added, “She wanted to write them herself. It had been hard for her at first, reading and writing. Miss Giddy had to keep showing her how to shape her letters the right way around. So when she made these, she was careful. And they came out perfectly.”

She sat back, quiet again. A shadow fell across her face, but something Toast saw there prompted her to ask in a low voice, “You okay?”

“Sometimes,” she said, curling her arms around her body, “I can still see her falling.”

Toast pressed a hand to her shoulder, briefly.

It echoed in memory, the sickening free rush of falling in his dream last night. But it hadn’t been his usual nightmare about Angharad. About a thing just taking on child shape, floating in red darkness with a rope of cord that connected it to nothing. Or about the kick of the gun in his hand, freshly fired. That was the sensation his worst nightmares took. He dreamed of warning shots that went astray. At Angharad. At Furiosa. That dream had only come once, but once was enough to experience the unthinkable—fighting her off, managing to pin her, pulling the trigger to buy time. Missing. Ending it all there. Just the once. But it was a bad night.

No wonder he had such trouble keeping track of his own past. He spent too much time running from it, from what it was, from what it could have been. He looked around him at the girls tracing the map. Sharing one of the last things he had left, the record of all his days—the _only_ thing left of them, except for the ghosts.

Capable looked at him. Her fingers still planted on the maps, his and the one Toast was drawing, the same place on both, a narrow line between ridges of rock. “Have you ever gone back there?” To the canyon.

He shook his head. The region was still held by Rock Riders, and scraps from the wreckage clogging the pass were being carried by parts traders in a hundred days’ radius. The woman in the border town had a twisted round of metal on one of her blankets, what might have been part of a wheel, and he’d thought he’d recognized the shape of the iron face in its center. He’d have traded for it if she’d wanted anything he offered, even if it was useless junk.

As far as Capable knew, Angharad and Nux both died in that same canyon. She hadn’t seen what Max and the Vuvalini found as they carried Furiosa into the back of the Gigahorse. The gray-haired woman had coiled the length of pink, tattered cord and tucked it grimly into a pouch from her jacket. At the time, concerned with the living, Max just assumed she had her own ways of disposing of such things. Now he wondered if she’d buried it in the Green Place. Here. And perhaps Angharad’s sisters knew the truth after all.

But it wasn’t his place to tell them. As the music box rang beneath her fingers again, he turned his good ear towards it, let the sound run under his breathing. This was the wrong time to get consumed thinking of deaths and almost-deaths. Here was what they had died for, risked everything for. Hope. Not a mistake, maybe, but dangerous. He remembered the glare of hundreds of days of salt, and the desperate kick of the gun again; knew the only thing more dangerous was despair.

“You should bring your guitar tomorrow night,” Toast said to Capable. She nodded, and in between the music they discussed another point on the map. Toast added a mark to it in yellow clay, the same rhomboid shape as she’d made the symbol for her own lost caravan.

His gaze drifted past them to the shelves and stacks against the walls. Cheedo noticed him looking and smiled with evident pride. He joined her, walking over to the books.

Slowly he made out the titles on their spines. Some had faded through the years, and so it seemed had his own grasp on the letters. He read them with care, as if listening intently for the words. Taking one up at random, he opened the front cover and was confronted with more text in one place than he’d seen in ten thousand days.

“What would you like to read?” Cheedo asked. When he shrugged, unable to answer, she moved down the row, suggesting authors and subjects with obvious excitement, too fast to follow. Bracelets chimed on her wrist, fragments of glass, metal, stone, and plastic spelling out their own stories.

Toast and Capable joined them. Turning from him, which was more of a relief than he’d let her see, Cheedo handed Capable another book of geography. The two of them began to pore over it.  Toast pulled a book from the shelf that had an unsettlingly detailed anatomical drawing on the cover. Cheedo gave her a book that seemed to have a leather cover imprinted with gilt, “for Iris.”

Max replaced the volume he’d been looking at and carefully took down the next one beside it. Curious what had been preserved—there wasn’t much pattern to how the books went together, medicine and history and poetry side by side. They left him to explore the shelves, even after Toast and Capable left with their selections. He seemingly wasn’t overstaying his welcome.

“It could start here,” Cheedo was saying in a low voice. She sat next to the Dag, who had a hand stirring the pool of water. Her other hand followed Cheedo’s, tracing along her back where it was revealed by the drape of her gown. Stopping at the top of her spine. The motion intimate, gentle, but not careful as if touching something tender or fragile. “It should be reshaped. Like the tree they’ve carved above the falls. Then we’d fit the map all around it.”

Reshaping herself—but not exactly that, just making the brand better fit the body she’d chosen to have, a body that was a record. Transformed like this former prison was by their words, by their choice to leave it. By their choice to return, too, not just to the Citadel but to this specific room in it, a choice he recognized without really understanding. He had spent too much time running.

“This’ll be east,” the Dag said, her fingers stroking clear skin beyond the lines of words.

“We can have the journey,” Cheedo said. “In red.”

“It’ll look…” He didn’t hear how it would look; the Dag spoke in too low a voice. Her lips against the cup of Cheedo’s ear, her hand remaining in motion over her shoulder, down her arm. Their long hair falling together, black and almost white. The moment was intimate but not private. After Cheedo nodded silently, she glanced his way, then turned back to the maps spread around them. The Dag turned with her. Still so close that there wasn’t space between them.

As he went towards the books near the door, they stopped their conversation long enough for Cheedo to encourage him to take one along, and for the Dag to return his own map. He took it from her a little too quickly and put it in his jacket pocket, unsettled at having misplaced it even for a moment. With a smile, they went back to their conversation. He didn’t listen in, didn’t want to intrude, but his left ear, the good ear, picked up more than he meant to.

“Here.” Cheedo’s fingers placing the memory on paper, the Dag’s on her own skin. “That night, in the hold of the Rig…while we waited for the engines to cool…”

“The green leaves all around us.”

“Falling, when I turned and…”

“Picking them out of—”

“My hair!” She laughed as the Dag combed through it.

“And—”

He left as they continued. Unsettled at that, too, or maybe surprised was the better word, something stirred up in him like it had been at the sight of all the books, a wealth letters and stories that he’d never have believed had survived. But not sorry he’d seen them together, happy. He took the book he’d had in his hands. The cover was a dozen shades of blue and green; the illustrations inside revealed a hundred more. It was about oceans and other ancient things.

He brought it down to the canteen where he ate his first meal of the day—a weird thought, that he could count on a second and even a third, if he wanted. Rather than scan his surroundings while he ate, habitually on guard, he examined the first chapter. Then the second. The pictures helped; he began reading the captions below them and then the rest of the large but crowded text on the pages.

Absorbed, as if in a complicated piece of repair work or setting the bait and trigger of a sensitive drop trap, he didn’t know how long it was before he noticed someone sitting across from him. Not until a warm leg shifted, knee knocking against his. Too gentle to jar, but still the leather brace creaked as he came alert.

“Hey.” Furiosa tucked her leg back so they no longer touched; he couldn’t tell if it had been deliberate. She chewed with her lips shut tight, but they pulled at one corner and she nodded when their eyes met. He nodded back. With her elbow she nudged her plate towards the middle of the table. It held rounds of seed cake and strips of dried fruit. She seemed happy when he took one.

He tilted the book slightly, offering it. She shook her head. “I don’t read much. My mother was teaching me.” Her sentence stopped there, a quick but deliberate silence; he wondered if she was as surprised to have mentioned her as Max was to hear it. “But it never got far. More than a signpost now and I feel dizzy.”

“Yeah.” He was beginning to recognize the feeling himself—split consciousness of the canteen and the world between the pages, a world of intricate systems and theory as substantial as windblown dust. Without a storyteller to speak and gesture, giving the words body and life. It seemed unreal. Impractical. But not unpleasant.

She swallowed and made a real, full smile, deep enough to show dimples. “You go ahead. It’s okay. You seem to like it.”

“I remember things like this.” He pointed at a picture that looked at first like floodwater drowning a town. But no, it was stranger than that; the shape beneath the waves was supposed to be there. Made up of millions of tiny, living things. “That’s a coral reef.” Pronounced carefully, it tasted different on his tongue.

When he turned a few more pages she stopped him at a picture of a forest, tall and dense with clouds rising through it like smoke.  Then a white-capped mountain.  She just looked, not asking questions, not turning or craning her neck to read the captions. And he watched her.

Aware of how long it had been since he’d seen her last—more than half a day. Aware of how close they sat now. Closer than they needed to, at the long and almost empty table. It was like he was being told a story, or reading one—silent, its meaning unclear, but every moment of it vivid. Absorbing. And somehow real.

He lost a few moments just caught up in the reality of her, while she turned to answer a question called from the next table over. He watched her move and listened to her voice without making sense of the words. It flowed like the music had, rougher and more irregular, but still catching his attention, absorbing and soothing. She laughed at something a woman said and the sound was loud, startling. He caught himself watching to see if the corners of her mouth dimpled again.

Instead he looked away, back at the book. Trying to understand all that he’d forgotten about coral reefs and rainforests and snow. Things that had once been equally real. That were gone now, recovered only in words. That he could read about and think about without feeling like part of him was being pried open.

After a few more pages he felt solid again, and remembered to reach for more food. They continued like that, slowly eating, him reading and her talking, while the sun moved past the canteen’s narrow south-facing window. He leaned over the book, catching his head in one hand, and then a shadow fell across him and he realized his forehead was almost touching hers. She didn’t move back. After a moment, he did. But just enough to better see the page. She didn’t say anything and didn’t seem to mind whether he was absorbed in reading or not. It felt comfortable, restful.

Eventually she did have to get up, return to whatever work required her elsewhere in the Citadel. “See you,” she said.

“Yeah.” And then, softly, “Thanks.”

She blinked, but nodded. Soon after he left the canteen too, taking the book with him.


	5. Third Day: Mapmaking (Part Two)

The book’s last chapters were a warning, tens of thousands of days too late. Describing the risks of environmental degradation, danger to the oceans, forests chopped and burned, sudden and devastating changes in weather and climate. There wasn’t any mention of thermonuclear threat, which seemed like an oversight. Either way, the mood of nostalgia that had prompted him to pick up the book didn’t survive the frantic, useless final pages.

So the third night also found him in the Green Place, walking to clear his head before sleep. Where had he gotten the idea that walking could help clear his head? It sounded like a piece of advice from the old world, the dead world. The world he’d been caught in all afternoon, filling his head rather than making it empty and calm. The vanished world that the gardens almost resembled with their greenness under glass-filtered moonlight, with the sound of trickling water and the lush-scented, sweetly damp air. Being here wasn't any better than trying to read the book.

Homesickness was too small a word for what he felt curdling between his lungs. How could it not be? There wasn’t a home left behind for him to miss. There had been an entire planet. Oceans. Forests. Something like here, but greater, a green and wet richness that all the wealth in this place was only a shadow of. A universe, stable and sane, full of all the things he’d stopped believing in.

He looked towards the door of the vault, knowing the words that waited on the other side of it. _Who killed the world?_

There are no rituals for mourning worlds. Nothing reaches deep enough. But he had seen people try, had seen them tear into themselves trying to rip grief out and scream their throats raw in hope of expelling it. People had murdered and slaughtered in hope that eventually, they would either kill their grief or kill the part of themselves capable of feeling it. It made no difference. It didn’t fix anything.

There was no fixing the world.

Inside one pocket, Max’s fingers brushed the folded map. Part of him needed the reassurance that it was still there. Holding whatever there was in his world that had not been lost.

You had to start with smaller things. You had to find your place among what was left.

Then he let it go.

At the end of the row, berry bushes had grown so heavy with fruit that their branches bent into the aisle. He picked off some of them, careful of the thorns. The berries were nearly past ripe, and the first handful burst in his fingers. He ate slowly, one at a time, letting pulp melt apart from the seeds in his mouth. A small, sensual pleasure that cleared his head after all.

Another turn brought him face to face with Furiosa. Perhaps some part of him expected her, but the suddenness of her appearance still brought him up short. She lifted her hands apologetically.

He nodded off the apology, his gaze dropping to the floor and then rising to her again. Like he had the day they met, the first day, he found it hard to look directly at her. It went deeper than surprise and was caught up with the realization that once again he had been waiting to see her. Not for any reason, simply because he knew he could.

They fell in beside each other, walking in silence. She looked with interest at the plant beds they passed, at sprouting seedlings and opening buds. She plucked the withering petals off a flowering bush and bent to smell the sap beading on a broken stem. Watching her was like seeing someone—not different, but more, and new. Another side of her, and he could only wonder how long it had been buried.

She had too much experience of the world to ever seem childlike, but this might be a glimpse of something brought up from her childhood. Something innocent.

He offered her the last of the berries cupped in his palm, thinking she might like to taste the gardens, too. She turned them down with a shake of her head and a small smile. After another few steps, she spoke.

“You were right—it’s beautiful.”

He hadn’t said that word the previous night. Had thought it but didn’t say it. Yet he wasn’t surprised that she had recognized his meaning. Not many used _beautiful_ anymore, and he wondered if she had picked the word up from the other women and their reading in the vault or if the Vuvalini still remembered it.

“Does it remind you of home?” he asked.

“It _is_ home.” She didn’t sound offended but spoke with easy certainty.

“Um-hm.” Apology, agreement, or question; he intended all of them and couldn’t articulate any, except a sound to indicate that he was listening. If she wanted him to.

Furiosa didn’t say anything more. She hadn’t come here for a conversation, but she hadn’t looked surprised to find Max in the Green Place. As if she knew, after last night, that he’d return. Expecting to see him.

Their shoulders brushed as they walked, and he felt the metal and heavy padding of her arm through his jacket. On her other side, her fingers followed the curve of a berry cane, lifting to avoid the thorns. Before his now-emptied left hand fell to his side, she turned and reached for it. Her hold closed on his wrist so matter-of-factly that it wasn’t startling. He let her pull his hand up to her mouth.

Her eyes met his a moment before she licked the dark juice lingering on his skin, using mostly her lips and just the smallest flicks of her tongue. Gentle. Her mouth whispered over scar tissue on his palm and the base of his little finger. It was soft, and more than anything it was warm. He felt the stream of breath as she exhaled, ticklish against the pad of his thumb.

When she released him, pulling back, a smear as dark as blood or oil covered her lower lip. It was his turn to lean closer. She nodded, tilted her face at just the right angle for him to lap it away. He didn’t taste berry sweetness so much as _her,_ smooth salt-tangy. When he reached the corner of her mouth, it opened slightly beneath him. Like a bolt to the heart, it froze him for an instant. Then Furiosa turned her head, letting him pass instead across her cheek. Which he did, grazing, pulling at the lobe of her ear as much by accident as intent, moving down her neck. Nuzzling more than kissing; exploring in the luxury of touch.

At her throat, he found the pulse rapid. It could be excitement, and part of it certainly was. But—maybe because of his own—he sensed anxiety, too. Neither of them were used to this. It wasn’t like the Green Place, bringing up long-forgotten peace. It was more personal, more physical, more immediate. And neither of them had such simple innocence to go back to.

So for the first few moments, letting his lips touch her felt like the bravest thing either of them had ever done. Then it stopped being brave, became natural instead. She sighed and her body seemed to roll against his. He licked along her jaw, tasting sweat, tasting the greenness of the surrounding chamber that already seemed to have permeated her skin. His hands were on her hip, her waist; he felt hers linking behind his back. As if her embrace was enough to anchor them, to keep them from falling apart. He was able to stop clinging and to caress instead, to travel along her spine, up to her nape, then to cradle her head. He kissed her face—beneath one eye, finding another sting of salt, and over the bridge of her nose and between her eyebrows.

Furiosa’s body stiffened. He thought he had made a mistake, but then she whispered, “Do that again.”

He did, every bit of it deliberate. Lips pursing, pushing, parting and closing again. The plush friction of flesh on flesh. The fingers of her right hand stroking, feeling what they could reach of him. Her left hand, the mechanical one, didn’t seem as capable of subtle movement. It only held him.

After his mouth found hers again, as they tasted and swallowed each other, her fingers circled his wrist. She guided his hand between her legs. There she held still, letting him decide what to do. Max spread his fingers, made them sway against her. Feeling softness under the leather, working out the warm shape. She gasped and tightened her grip, pulling them closer. It was still a grip he could break, but he didn’t want to. The strength of her hold was as dizzying as the heat between her thighs, intoxicating. The description came to mind no matter how long it had been since he sought out drunkenness. Alcohol couldn’t solve any of his problems. Maybe this couldn’t, either. Yet it flooded his senses and spun his thoughts around like a furious storm, made every part of him tighten in anticipation. It teased him with hope.

Gradually her hold slackened as his hand worked. At last her fingers unlinked and began to climb. He felt her touch slide up his arm, inch by inch. It passed over his shoulder, along his throat and jaw to his mouth. She found his lips already parted for her. He sucked on a fingertip, drawing it in. His tongue pressed between the pad and the nail and he tasted grease, oil. Surprised, or even overwhelmed, she curled her finger and it was just enough to scratch. Max swallowed against the sting as she pulled out.

“I…”

“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

He wanted to tell how open he was to her, and how much he wanted his lips anywhere she would have them.

Wanted in a way he’d gotten out of the habit of. Desire was dangerous, it was distracting, it was usually doomed to failure. But now he wanted so much he felt clumsy with wanting. Naked with it.

Vulnerability was almost a relief, but it was also difficult, like exercising muscles that had gone unused for too long, like putting weight on his unbraced knee. He leaned until he felt her metal fingers digging into the flesh of his back. His jaw tipped, baring his throat. If she wanted it.

He felt her lips over his pulse, her tongue passing between them to swipe across his skin. His fingers forgot to keep moving against her groin. Her hips knocked his insistently and he tried to continue, less certain of the effect he was having except that her breath became unsteadier and hotter.

His heart pounded and he knew she could feel it. The idea was itself a sensation, knowing he was known. It made his breathing and his pulse feel stronger. It made him feel more alive. For all the effort he went through to keep that way, he sometimes overlooked it. He’d made his body a self-generating engine, which kept fueling itself and kept in enough repair to keep running, driving nowhere in particular. Here in the Citadel he had become something more. He’d begun to feel more, as if for this, to make this worthwhile.  

But her touch wasn’t in itself a culmination. It was different—a border had been crossed, and not one that had been necessary or inevitable—yet it hadn’t changed anything essential. He’d never needed this, yet once he’d given it. A gift. Long past now. Dying like the rest of the world. Nothing he ever expected would survive. Yet here he was, and here she was, as if nothing had changed, as if they always had been this way. As if he always had been ready. And for the first time in this new world he was ready, felt  _capable_ , and she also wanted it, and he could give again…

He took her hand and they walked, still close, down the rows of hanging green. The library was ahead; they emerged from the plants beside the upended vault door half-covered by potted seedlings. They went around it, and she pushed him, gently, the rest of the way. Past the curtain, beyond which no light shone. But they didn’t go into the empty library. When his back met the wall he stopped. Knelt. Furiosa leaned over him, braced by her left arm. He felt enclosed under the curve of her body, but not trapped. Safe.

His own hands ran over her, from her arms over the shallow curves of her breasts down to her waist. By then his fingers had started trembling, though not from anxiety this time, and he had to move slowly and focus as he undid the straps there. The ones holding her prosthesis in place he was careful to leave alone. She no longer wore the heavy skull-in-wheel emblem. Instead her belt featured lengths of thin chain linked by a twist of leather, along with three charms: a perfect black feather and two beads, one of bone carved in an abstract pattern too complex to make out in the shadows, the other of water-green stone. She showed him which lengths of chain and leather to tug on to loosen the belt, which he then helped her step out of. The laces at the front of her trousers yielded single-handedly.

As he pulled them down, his eyes ran over the marks on her skin. The jagged end of a scar ran from her torso towards her groin. He had seen the top portion of it that night at the pool, but hadn’t followed it. Now his thumb traced its hook until it disappeared in her hair. His fingertips dipped in what looked like a long-healed bullet wound in the flesh on the outer slope of her right thigh. And over her hips, fine-grained marks rippled like waves. Stretch marks—the kind that came with a growth spurt. In the Green Place, the first Green Place, nourishment had been plentiful enough to allow for growth spurts. Another glimpse of her past, gone but not lost, remembered and growing within her, around them.

Max traced those with his fingers, too. He pushed her trousers further out of the way, keeping his hands on her all the while. He kept touching her. Not just undressing her to get to one part of her body, but discovering all of it. Holding her waist to help her balance as she lifted one foot, then the other to step out of her clothing. Until she was naked between her waist and her ankles, standing over him in a position that could be undignified to both of them, but didn’t matter. It was unpracticed but natural. Where they fit.

He looked up and caught the gleam of her eyes. Her right hand cupped his cheek and brushed at the ends of his hair. She didn’t use the hold to turn him or bring him up or down. He would have been all right with it if she had.

Moving at his own pace was slower and more uncertain. He kissed the soft skin below her stomach, just above where her curls started. The scent of water and growing leaves that filled the room was overtaken by the scent of her. Breathing it in, he remained there with his lips on her and his forehead resting against her torso so that her own breaths seemed to echo in his skull. He felt her tremble from his warmth and closeness. But she waited patiently until he was ready to move on. Down.

The tip of his nose nudged her clit and her legs slid a little further apart. Her hand went to the back of his head. He hoped she might show him where and how he should touch her, as she had shown him how to undo her belt. Like a map to territory they were both getting lost in. And as the seconds passed, he realized she wasn’t leaving him to guess. But she didn’t know how she wanted to be touched, what she wanted him to do for her.

She seemed to like feeling his mouth, so he nuzzled the join of her thigh, and he kept his hands in motion. Running them down her legs, feeling taut muscle shiver and brace, then sliding up with the rasp of fine hair against his palms.

Gliding between her labia for lubrication, he ran his thumb over her clit, which grew harder with each stroke. Her scent grew stronger, unfamiliar and intimate. His fingers passed through curling hair, between her full lower lips, then spread them apart. Eventually, at last, he licked at her sex. The taste washed over his tongue, tart and musky and wet. Her fingers brushed his face and scalp, sharing the rhythm.

He swallowed, he drank from her as if from a fountain. His tongue teased as if to catch water from a cleft in rock; he pressed close and moved slowly, both eager and careful, almost reverent. Because this energy growing between them was something rarer and more precious than water.

And more incendiary.  Each mouthful of her was like gasoline, intense and powerful, and he knew that if he swallowed her down, _when_ he swallowed her down, it would go right to the core of him and ignite there. It would burn through his veins, it would hurt. Or something like hurt. He was almost ready for it. The thought should have left him choking and his throat should have closed up, but it didn’t, if anything it opened just as the rest of him felt open. Felt ready. Felt alive.

His fingers continued moving on her inner thighs, rubbing gently. Considering the force of the sensations, it would make sense if his body was trying to melt, to merge with hers, to join on a deep and instinctive level. But it wasn’t so easy. They were tender, their movements careful, and it was okay, but as they tried to sort through what they felt and how they should act they were also disparate, awkward. At first she seemed to have expected him to do something other than just lick. Her body moved uncertainly against his mouth. And then, past the first surprise, she seemed to figure it out, to see what he was trying to do, to find how to make it even better. She rocked, grinding his nose, his lips, and his chin in turns against the feathering of hair at the rise of her sex and at her clit below it.

When he pulled back, breathing deep, her hand went to his face again. Gentle, checking. He nodded. Her fingers curved under his jaw, then rose to his lips. Again he parted them for her.

A moan came as she dragged the pad of her finger over the inner curve of his lower lip and he didn’t at first recognize it as his. She pushed at his mouth and played over it, and he realized she was savoring how he yielded to her, all his pliability, savoring the softness. And it felt _good_ to be soft, to be savored. So good that for long moments there were only her hand and his mouth, her slick fingertips rubbing, the pull in his throat when he couldn’t help swallowing.

And then the muscles in her hips jerked, pushing forward, and of course she was aware of far more than her hand and she wanted to feel his mouth with more than just her fingers. But again she waited for him. Until at last he let her fingers pull out and brought his head between her legs again. She shivered at the prickle of his stubble against the inside of her thighs. Her hand stroked through his hair. As he sucked at her clit, lightly, almost sipping, her hold tightened. Still she didn’t pull at him, or shove or rake with her nails. As if she was handling something fragile.

He pressed his tongue into her, as deep as it could go, drawing another long shudder. Her fingers traced down his temple, under his ear, along his arm to his wrist. They pressed it briefly before leaving his body entirely. When he pulled out from her after another stroke, he saw her hand rise and push under the fabric of her wrap to cradle one breast. He wished he could offer that caress for her, but his hands wouldn’t, couldn’t move from where they cupped her pelvis.

Each time she rocked he felt her silver-marked skin against his palms, and he both heard and felt the throb of her pulse in her thighs. Rapid and strong and alive. Suddenly that was what he wanted most. Not just that he felt alive but that she did, too. As simple and as strange as that.

He wanted to give her…everything. All that he had, even if it was a mistake, even if he should know better. He’d done it before and had no regrets. And this time he wasn’t desperate, because the cost of failure wasn’t too high. He wasn’t trying to save her.

He wasn’t needed, just wanted. As much, even, as he wanted her. How much he was only now realizing, and it felt like his first sight of the Green Place, like his most dizzying dreams, something awesome and almost awful, something dangerous, that would hurt, that he hadn’t thought belonged to him.

In this moment, he didn’t care for her any more than he ever had. But it was like the moment he slid under the still surface of the water in the pool, realizing how deep it went. And all of that was in him. Until he thought to give it to her Max hadn’t realized how much was left inside him, how far from empty he was.

He licked until his tongue and jaw both ached, swallowed until inside and out he burned, and there was no taste or scent but her. As if he were submerged. The taste of her was enough for him to almost remember oceans.

Her skin turned slippery with sweat. When he next stopped for breath he felt a drop fall from her, smelled its salt. She gulped and moved towards him again. She wasn’t breathless, and her breathing didn’t become faster or erratic. It remained smooth and regular as if timed with each thrust of her hips. But as her clit throbbed against his tongue he heard her inhale louder, exhale more harshly so that the air seemed to drag at her lungs. Even as it slowed her rocking became more urgent, more extreme, and her body swung with the strength of an oil drill or a V8’s piston.

And _this_ was what she had been holding back, with her patience. Without restraint, she pushed until her forehead pressed to the wall, cushioned only by the back of her metal palm. Until his shoulders were crushed against stone and his head strained back. But then her other hand was stroking through his hair, shielding the back of his skull and neck. He felt the strain in her curling knuckles. And it mattered, that she had let herself go almost entirely except for that last bit of carefulness.

Even if she hadn’t been careful, it would have been worth the risk. It was a fragile feeling, elusive, being okay with the chance of not being okay. Being brave. Knowing she was, too. They had to be, to find goodness and to try not to cut themselves on its edges, the places where it came up against danger. But he wanted to give her something good, and he could, and she trusted him enough to receive and share in this, and he trusted her whether or not she held back.

He let her rocking drive his head into her palm and he kissed her, first open-mouthed and then closed, almost delicately. He licked firm and slow, letting his tongue slip from between his lips to hers as they aligned. She moved faster again, meeting and making use of his rhythm. He added his fingers, slipping easily through her wetness and inside her. She contracted around them as they curled, not pressing in much deeper than his tongue had, not needing to. He kissed her again. He licked as her orgasm flooded over them.

As she was coming, she sighed, a sound ragged and soft and so tender he ached from it.

She slumped against the wall, and he knelt leaning against her. For several seconds they could only catch their breath. Then her metal hand reached for him. She pulled and he came up. Pain spread through his left leg from kneeling so long, uncoiling in hot tendrils, but it wasn’t unbearable. Her eyelids flickered when he winced, taking it in. She pressed her body against his until the rock supported his weight instead, and with her right hand still cradling the back of his head, she kissed him. Her tongue swept into his mouth. But as his own tried to meet it she pulled out, teasing his lips. Then in with another stroke.

The pressure strained his jaw, already sore, but the sweep of her tongue became soothing. He let her lick, kiss, taste. It took him a few moments to realize what she was doing, how she did it—mimicking his movements against her sex, which she could still taste on him. Curious, playful, boldly erotic, she wasn’t satisfied with just his mouth. One finger hooked through the bracelet on his wrist, and by it she pulled his hand up. It was still slippery from her, and a chill swept over his skin as she licked it. Like fever, cool and hot at once, though never as hot as her tongue.

His entire body yearned towards her, inclining instinctively. Her metal hand on his shoulder caught him, steadied him. He found her mouth and kissed her as if it would feed him.

Furiosa’s other hand settled at his back, ran down it, came around. His breath stopped against her lips when she cupped him. He was hard, and he hadn’t realized it before. The excited charge between them he had mistaken entirely for her own arousal. Some of it was, but not all or only that.

Her fingers began to move, and it sent a cold shiver up his spine. Excitement, yes. And surprise. This was something he hadn’t done in so long—

—wasn’t sure how to do—

Surprise became alarm. He wanted to kiss her, wanted to keep tasting her, wanted her arms around him and wanted her hands to do what they would. But the wanting on its own couldn’t guide him.

It felt like falling. He waited for something to catch him but nothing did, not even her mouth or her embrace.

His hands were behind him, pressed on the wall as if frozen there. It felt better to have them immobile, as if pinned; he felt surer of himself. They didn’t form fists. Didn’t claw against the stone. Didn’t rise to push her away. Didn’t need to even if he had felt driven to it. She had already released him and was stepping back.

He wanted to be ready for her, but he wasn’t.

He was close to it, maybe even closer than he had realized. Pinning his own hands reminded him. The brush of her fingers against his wrist had reminded him. He could almost…but no, he wouldn’t ask, couldn’t even desire that. However much he wanted to be ready for it, too.

This was almost right. But not enough. And if he was wrong, the risk would be too great. They were already so open, so easy to break.

She still stood close enough to whisper. “I want to do something for you.”

He nodded.

He said, “You already have.”

In the quiet darkness, she sighed. He raised his hands, brought them to her waist. Her fingers cupped the back of his head, but she only held him, not pulling him closer. He was the one to bend towards her. Their kiss was brief, warm. Her touch remained on him until he stepped away.

Max left her in the Green Place, sitting on the overturned prison door among the sprouting plants. He could still see her there when he closed his eyes. Taste her in his mouth. Lying in bed, he remembered her heat and strength and sheer physical presence, how she rose over him in the dark, not overwhelming but exactly what he needed. He could hear her sigh, not just satisfaction but ecstasy, when it was blissfully enough.

He folded his hands across his body, wrapping the fingers of one around the opposite wrist. Just above the cord bracelet, which for so long had just been a sensation, a stripe of pressure across his skin that had lost its connection to any memory. Gripping tighter. In a way it was what he needed, too. His heart pounded too fast for rest, charged by what had happened, what hadn’t.

Now he could touch himself the way she had been going to. Relearn how he felt, what he wanted. Except he already knew the answer to that. Without it, and without her to offer it to, mere bodily relief wasn’t necessary. He wouldn’t need to seek it. He’d already been given too much besides.

He didn’t even have nightmares about wanting to.


	6. Fourth Day: Return

In the morning, Max returned the book.

He hadn’t finished the last chapters and wasn’t going to. Still, he felt glad to have seen the rest of it. In the light of day its reminders seemed more bittersweet. And what they had driven him to—he walked down the growing rows of the Green Place, unsteady because of the lingering pang in his leg, and almost staggered at the memory. Too lucid, too simple to have been a dream. He hadn’t dreamed at all last night, and maybe the rest of his reeling dizziness was from the unfamiliar sensation after he’d had enough rest to clear his head for once. Among other things.

Distracted, he didn’t hear the voices until he came up to the half-open curtain at the library door. Booklend piles waited against the wall. It wasn’t clear what to do with books to be returned. At last he decided he’d have to go in. He cleared his throat to announce his presence, along with his footsteps echoing down the short concrete tunnel.

The women sat around the pool, fingers stirring the water and flicking up drops. Between their conversation rose a higher sound, laughter, almost a squeal. A child’s sound.

Seed had either very pale hair or very little of it crowning a perfectly round head. The baby wore loosely wrapped white cloth, from which both legs wiggled free and kicked vigorously. He guessed the identities of the two others sitting with Cheedo and the Dag, who waved for him to join them. Manyplenty, with smooth brown skin and a build a full hand shorter than the aptly named Golden Eyes, held Seed in her lap and flipped through a book on the floor in front of her. She murmured the words half under her breath in a steady stream. The reading seemed to be mostly for her own pleasure, though, because Seed’s head was turned, eyes following how Golden Eyes dangled one of Cheedo’s bracelets just within reach of the baby’s left hand. The baby’s only hand, Max realized once he came closer.

He crouched slowly, stretching his sore leg in front of him and discovering a small blond doll in between the cushions. Golden Eyes took it from him, draped the bracelet on as a necklace, and made the doll dance over her dimpled knees. Max rested the book about oceans in his lap.

After a while, Manyplently smiled at him and shifted the child in her arms in a silent but obvious offer. Max’s first thought was to refuse. But by then his hands had already come up, turning to cradle the head and tuck the small body closer to his. It was simple, almost instinctual. No, more familiar than instinct. Memory.

It had been so long.

He bent his head and breathed in the smell, milky and soothing. Seed waved, and he offered his finger for the small hand to wrap around. The child’s right arm, also waving energetically, ended cleanly just below the elbow. A congenital amputation—the word rose in memory, where it had been planted over nine months of thrilled and anxious research, long ago—often caused by environmental stress or toxins. But Seed looked healthy, an alert and growing full-life. Bright eyes blinked up at his. The grip around his fingers squeezed tighter.

“Yeah?” the Dag murmured.

He shaped the word “ _Beautiful._ ” It came out as a mumbled hum. Without shifting his hold of the child, he offered her a thumbs-up.

Cheedo and Golden Eyes laughed, but he thought they understood.

Once Seed’s mothers took the baby back, his hands searched for something else to occupy them. They came up with the book. He offered it to Cheedo.

“I was down in the garage,” he told them. “The blackthumb says my car should be ready tomorrow morning. So I’ll be going, then.”

She carried the book back to its shelf and placed it next to the large volume whose endpages held the map she had drawn yesterday. There she hesitated, her fingers on the spine. Looking back at him over her shoulder, she asked, “Would you rather take it with you?”

He frowned, not understanding.

“You could return it…the next time you come back.”

At first he didn’t answer. He hadn’t thought of returning, not again—not even to dismiss the idea. It wasn’t possible, wasn’t the sort of thing that would happen. It had never been safe for him to return anywhere. There had never been any reason to. Any more than there’d been a reason to stay.

“Thank you,” he said, because he’d never been invited to return before either. “But…” He couldn’t say no, and he couldn’t promise, and he wasn’t sure how to explain why.

“Maybe not,” the Dag said. Her eyes narrowed on him, but not suspiciously. When she tipped her head, as if studying him at another angle, her mouth softened. “Maybe a book wouldn’t last the kind of places he’d take it.”

He nodded, and Cheedo put the book back on the shelf.

“Thank you,” he said again. “Until tomorrow.” At least he wouldn’t leave them without warning this time. And he didn’t have to say goodbye just now—which was a relief, because he wasn’t certain how to go about it.

He stopped at the door, glancing back. At the Green Place. At a garden. A library. Distantly he heard the baby’s laugh, the murmur of water. The world hadn’t lost them.  

He had a choice, this time, whether to turn away.

And he did. As always. Yet the choice made it easier.

His steps led him lower through the corridors that were becoming familiar. They led him nowhere; he only wandered, uncertain what he was doing. Maybe practicing. He veered from the old bloodbank, And then he turned down a hall that he had only passed along once before. But he knew it. He remembered how to find his way to her.

Furiosa had left her door open, not all the way but enough to suggest welcome. Toast was headed down the corridor in the other direction, seemingly having just left it. Something about her posture caught Max’s attention—she was awkward, agitated.

“All right?” he asked.

She looked over her shoulder. When she saw it was him, she smiled. Very fleetingly, almost shy. “Yeah. Hey.”

She wasn’t disturbed, he realized, she was excited. Clearing her throat, she glanced toward the door he stood beside, as if in explanation. And then, knowing he’d go in, she continued on her way.

He opened the door a crack wider, and at the sound of her voice—softly, “Come in”—he entered. Furiosa rose from her seat on a leather-and-iron trunk. Her face brightened when their eyes met, but it had already been bright.

He closed the door behind him, all the way. She started moving, pacing in front of the wall where her prosthetic hung beside the crow-wing patterned wheel.

“Toast asked—I just…” She swallowed her words and made a motion like a nod, more to herself than him, and said more steadily, “We agreed I would become her initiate mother.”

“Congratulations.”

She nodded again, with another swallow. He looked away in case she needed space to collect herself. He didn’t know, exactly, what the role of initiate mother entailed. But it was clear how much it meant from her reaction and Toast’s, how significant it was to both of them. The young woman wasn’t just a road warrior; she was one of the Vuvalini. The newest and likely not the last.

For a time Furiosa must have thought there would never be any initiate mothers again, and certainly not that she’d ever be one. He understood that. And he understood—faintly—how it felt, when something good came back. How frightening that was. How fragile.

“She’s going to leave again,” Furiosa said.

“To the border town?”

“That too. But she wants to go farther. Patrolling the borders, but also… You know she wants to search for her family.” After his nod, she added, “She showed me her map.”

“Yeah.” He watched her walk to the back of the room. “I hope it helps.”

She nodded, pushing aside the curtain. It seemed to express not just agreement, that she hoped it too, but also certainty— _it will; she will._

The reunion was easy to picture: the lone figure approaching a circled caravan out on the sand, the fabrics on her colorful truck curling in the wind behind her. Hands spread, out of reach of the weapons she obviously carried. They would expect nothing less. They might not recognize her at first—but then, even he had known her on sight in the border town, and though he hadn’t been apart from her for so long, she wasn’t his own daughter. Even if he sometimes felt something like it.

How would she introduce herself? Would she mention that she’d come from the Citadel? That might get a different reaction these days. Maybe she’d simply give names: her own, and that of her initiate mother (he realized now he was remembering a different reunion, patching the gaps where imagination failed; but it felt right, too) and then her birth mother—and a woman would leap down from a gunner’s post on one of the caravan cars and hold out her own hands…

He followed Furiosa into the niche behind the curtain. She settled onto the hammock there, offering him a hand and shifting her limbs and weight as he joined her. With her help, he stretched out his braced leg. Her fingers in the hollow of his knee sent a flash up the nerves. Their eyes met, and her lips pressed tighter at one corner, not quite a smirk but enough to show she knew it.

She didn’t ask what brought him here, not aloud; she didn’t need to. He felt her watching him even when he turned away. The warmth of her curiosity. Unless she just liked looking at him. A memory rose of her eyes intent on his face after she cut his hair, her fingers running over it.

It had been so long that the thought felt new to him, but it also felt right.

Thinking of initiations, he realized there was something he had come here to say, something very specific. That he didn’t want to leave unfinished. But it would be hard. Looking out the window, he spotted a multicolored haze over the water, like a sheen on oil. It took him some moments to recall the name of it— _rainbow_. It had been at least a thousand days since he last saw rain. Water out of the air. It seemed miraculous enough without being accompanied by the light.

It wasn’t the word he should have been searching for, that he needed to find. That she was waiting for. That he _couldn’t_ find, couldn’t say.

It wasn’t that he was ashamed. But he couldn’t put words to the desire, to what seemed to be every kind of feeling at once, what seemed like too much and just barely enough. There were too many words required and too few that seemed to fit.

“You wanted to do something for me,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

Talking was hard. Always hard. It took him time to express things; he remembered, distantly, speeches that had filtered over years (years?) before finally stumbling from his tongue, guided at last by the pressure of needing to be said. Because time had become short, then. He’d sensed it as if in the atmosphere, how little they all had left. There’d been so much he hadn’t been able to say even then, even to _her_ —

He closed his eyes, fleeing the memory. Furiosa’s hand brushed his arm, so lightly it was barely there at all. A sound came from the back of her throat, but she didn’t speak. She waited.

As if they had hundreds of days.

They didn’t. They’d had four days this time, and now only one was left. So he should say whatever he needed to, in case there was no other chance. As he had once before. When she was dying and he would have let her take his name with her, not caring, having nothing left to protect.

He wanted to ask to be broken open again. Even the question could break him. His every instinct protested. Once he gave her this, it said, there would be no way to protect himself. But that was already true. Whatever he should have withheld, he’d failed to long ago. Wanting to save her, caring about the safety of their… _daughters_ wasn’t the right word, even if she was becoming a mother of a kind to one of them, but no other word would fit and he was tired of fighting for words. It was too late. He was already vulnerable. It didn’t matter if he wanted more, if what he wanted formed one more point of vulnerability. If he wanted to be _made_ vulnerable.

There was nothing left but to be brave.

Her hand hovered near his left arm, not touching but ready to, and she didn’t move as he drew away. Only waited. He pulled on the loop at the end of the bracelet. He felt the cords go slack, then tugged until they unraveled. Once he unwove the braid into a single length, he coiled it around one wrist. Held in place with a tuck that was too basic to even be a knot, it formed a base for him to wrap more of the cord around his other forearm. It was awkward but he managed to draw both limbs together. Then he was trying to bind himself one-handed, straining his fingers to tighten the cord. It pulled, snug enough to dimple the skin, to be felt.

It felt so much better than he had expected. As if holding him, keeping him in place, in one piece.

His pulse pounded hard enough to ache in his wrists as he looked up. Exposed now.

He wasn’t anxious about her reaction, because he had no idea how she would react. Max trusted Furiosa, and realizing that was even more of a shock than knowing how much he cared about her, even more sickeningly dangerous, but there it was. So whatever happened, he was able to wait for it, to be patient even if he couldn’t anticipate.

He didn’t have to wait long.

Furiosa’s eyes were on his bound hands. “Why?” she asked. Not incredulous or disgusted. Soft. Genuinely curious.

“It just is,” he said. “What I want.”

Her tongue passed over her lips, slowly, in a way he’d never seen before. She still didn’t look at his face, but neither did she look away from his hands. “The entire time I knew you, there were red marks around your wrists. You’d been bound. You bled.” Trying to get free, she didn’t say and didn’t have to. She’d have done the same. “What makes this different?”

“I…I, uh…”

“Are you a scarjoy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Some of the War Boys would like to collect scars. Not just to show off. It was _getting_ them they liked.”

“Oh,” he said, understanding. “No. I’m not. Not really.”

It wasn’t pain he was after, and certainly not injury. Not really anything physical. But…he thought about those moments last night, when he was certain what they were doing together was going to hurt, and when he looked forward to it. When he felt her burn inside him. When he forgot himself, lost himself, and when it was safe to lose himself because he knew she was there to find him. When she surrounded him and it was almost enough to hold him together.

When she offered more, and it was almost enough. And too much at the same time. And too much already.

She had broken him before, and he’d survived it.

“I wouldn’t need to escape you,” he said.

She blinked, raised her head as if examining him at a different angle—as if looking beyond him.

“It is different. It…” He tried to move his hands in an explanatory gesture but the bonds caught them up short. Forced him to try for more words. “Because I can choose it, it helps.”

Furiosa waited, not needing to ask, _But_ why _choose it?_

Why _did_ he need it, need it as much as she needed green? He half wondered if it was symbolic, the need to be held in place—dream logic—but the sensation itself, even now, felt so viscerally satisfying.

“And because I’d like it if it came from you. You…” Not wanting to alarm her, he didn’t say _broke._ He said, “You cracked something. Like a shell. And I grew out again.”

It seemed to alarm her anyway. To shock her even more than the idea that he wouldn’t try to escape her. To frighten her, like the Green Place had terrified him—not in the way of something terrible, but of something too good to be true. “How did I do that?” she asked.

“You had hope. You tried to do something. To be better. And it was as if you saw I could be better. You lost everything and…tried again, and I couldn’t do anything but try with you. I don’t know what more to say. Maybe anybody could have done it. But no one ever had until you. And I’m glad it was you.”

Eventually, she nodded. The hammock shifted under them as she took a deep breath. Her body rocked a little as she folded her arms, clasping her right elbow with her hand.

“Have you done this before?”

He started unwinding the cord from his wrists. The truth was, he hadn’t. Not in the way she was asking. Playing with the idea—flirting with it—letting himself be pinned, briefly, held by a tight grip that was still all too easy to break—just in _fun…_ Wanting something more, maybe, but never letting that desire surface, never voicing it. Until there was nobody to voice it to, and no reason to bother.

As he began to braid the bracelet back together, he told her, “This was a gift.”

“Someone you lost?” On its own, it was barely a question. But it carried others in its wake—names left unnamed, losses uncounted. A history she’d never asked about, even when she volunteered scraps of her own.

“Yes,” he said.

She lifted her hand and closed it on the air. Max watched her form the gesture carefully. Then he tried to mimic it. Grasping nothing. Pulling it towards his heart as if to hold it in. At last, feeling clumsy, he unfolded his fingers. Letting go.

Furiosa looked across the room at the wheel with spokes like crow’s feathers. She reached for the beads and feather on her belt, stroked them as she said, “The things you didn’t do…didn’t get the chance to…sometimes last longer than what you did. Regret for what you missed doesn’t go away. But they don’t come back.”

“No.” He didn’t expect her to replace the one he’d lost any more than he could replace the Valkyrie, be what the Valkyrie could have been to Furiosa. Should have been, if they’d had time.

It wasn’t replacement, but something new. Something neither of them had the chance of before.

“I never…” she started. “Never liked to feel my face touched. Or even for someone to get too close to it.” As her head bent at a slight angle, not quite turned to him, he caught glimpses of the faint scars on her brow and cheeks. The bruising, though, had faded without a mark. Not for the first time. The paint was long-washed from her skin.

He hadn’t considered, though maybe he should.

“I did,” he said. “Last night.”

“When you did, it was all right.” She nodded. Asked, “What do you want me to do for you?”

Not _to_ you. Which helped.

“Touch me,” he said.

She did, then. Her hand gently cupped his cheek. He turned his head into it as she leaned closer, straddling one of his legs. As the hammock rocked his arms went out, instinctively, spreading to adjust their weight. Furiosa’s breath rasped at his ear in a low chuckle. It felt good, his fingers tangling in the ropes beneath them, holding, steadying as the length of her body settled alongside his. It felt good, her strength and heat, the way her chest rose and fell, the thrum of her pulse in his good ear.

Her chin brushed his forehead as she spoke. “Where do you want it to be?”

He looked up at her. “Where…?”

“We could do it here. But not _in_ here—” She wiggled a little, sending the hammock rocking. She chuckled again, and this time, he joined her.

“And when?” Her hand traced down his neck, past the torn collar of his shirt. His heart jumped beneath it. Jumped at the thought that _it could happen now_. In fear or relief or even joy.

Furiosa’s eyes followed the route of her fingers. They held two expressions. One he had seen in the pool, when she trimmed his hair and beard—appraising, liking what she saw. The other look, tightening her brow, widening her gaze, seemed taken aback to see herself touching someone like this. Gently. Luxuriantly.

There was a tap on the door.

Furiosa went to it, climbing over Max’s body—unsettling more than the balance of the hammock. She ran a hand down the front of her shirt and through her hair before letting the knocker in. Capable.

The keys chimed at her waist as she stepped over the threshold. Furiosa clasped her shoulder. “Did Toast tell you?”

“Yes.” Capable returned her embrace.

“It’s okay to let everyone know, once she’s told the others.”

“She was thinking of making an announcement tonight. At the gathering.”

Furiosa folded her arms, a casual gesture. “I’ll be up there at sundown, but I might not stay much past that.”

“Why? Are you getting tired, old woman?”

Furiosa laughed with her. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ll have other plans.”

“Oh.” Capable hadn’t looked towards the beaded curtain, didn’t seem to know he was there as she said, “Will Max come?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him.”

The younger woman’s smile became more thoughtful. “And what about tomorrow? Two hundred and fifty days. Does he even remember?”

Of course he did, though he hadn’t considered that they might commemorate the day of their return. The beginning of a new world. Like waking from a nightmare. And the last time he had fled from a celebration.

“I’ll ask,” Furiosa said. “But you know he won’t be kept.”

“I know.” She sighed. “I’ll see you at sundown. I’m bringing my guitar.”

“I’ll see you.” Furiosa closed the door behind her, then returned to the alcove. She stopped on the way at one of the cabinets, taking out a water jug. She offered it to him, then climbed into the hammock.

“Do you want to come?” she asked. “It’s just a day-before sort of thing. For all those too impatient for the real party.”

The moisture in his mouth helped. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah.” She took the jug from him, drank, wiped her mouth. “And tomorrow?”

“Mechanic says I’ll be ready to go.”

“That doesn’t mean we’ll throw you out.”

He met her eyes. “Do you want to meet me tonight?”

“Yes,” she breathed. Setting the water on the floor, she curled against him again. He felt her muscles loosen, relaxing. How much chance had she found to do that?

“Maybe…it could be a celebration of our own.” Both of them chuckled. He slipped an arm under and around her waist, feeling her warm skin through the thin shirt. While she’d talked with Capable, he had thought about where. A place he’d feel ready, safe, better. Place was important to her, he guessed by the way she had asked. Like last night, against the wall of the vault. In the Green Place. _Home,_ she had said.

And he knew where he wanted it to be.

If she was surprised when he told her, she didn’t show it. “Yeah,” she said. “That sounds good.”

“I’ll wait for you there?”

“I’m not sure they’d let you hang around—even if you explained why.” This time her laughter was hearty enough to make the hammock swing gently. He joined in ruefully.

“Then I’ll be...somewhere.”

“After sunset, I’ll find you.”

“That sounds good.” His head came to rest against her shoulder, and he closed his eyes. His pulse was hammering. It was going to happen. He had asked.

He slipped the cord bracelet into one of his jacket pockets by feel. Furiosa’s arms folded around him, and one of her legs tucked between his while the other dropped over the side of the hammock. Her foot tapped the floor, keeping them rocking.

He wasn’t tired, but the inside of his head went dim, went gray, like the dust-filled air in the wake of a sandstorm. He couldn’t imagine what hers felt like. She turned her head a little, nuzzling his face.

 They hung there, suspended, together, not keeping track of the time.


	7. Fourth Day: Fire

He spent the afternoon packing. There wasn’t much to pack, but he went over each item, deciding what could be repaired or replaced while he had the chance. The storehouses were open to him, and when he came across Toast again she secured him several rounds of ammunition from the armory. Then he went to the canteen for a slow meal, one of his last chances to eat without needing to be rapid about it. The absence of desperation was almost familiar now, and he tried to bank down the feeling of _waiting,_ tried not to anticipate. Not yet.

Capable passed through with a smile in his direction, and after she left one of the cooks set a package of dried supplies next to Max on the bench. A few others were around, but they didn’t bother him, focusing instead on their own bowls. He lingered as the place grew vacant.

 Furiosa found him there once it got dark.

“Come with me?”

She led him down to the pool between the buttes. In the twilight, he watched her strip. She gave him a look that drew Max forward, stepping in to help her. Her hand braced on his shoulder as he peeled her trousers down; her breath ruffled his hair. He couldn’t resist kissing her hip, the skin with its marks like the pattern of waves.

Straightening up, he winced at the pull in his leg. She frowned in concern as she helped him undo the knee brace, but he shrugged. “It was worth it.”

Furiosa laughed shortly. When his shirt came off, she ran her thumb along his collar bone, then down his right arm. She settled there over the needle’s mark.

His hand brushed her side, the knot of scar tissue between her ribs.

“Worth it,” she said, and pulled him with her as she waded into the water.

They washed each other, hands gliding over shoulders, hips, and thighs. She came around to rest her back to his chest, her pelvis settling into the bowl of his, and after a breathless moment he began to touch her again. Not quite chaste, but only erotic by promise. Their skin was warm under the water and the night sky. The roughness of her scars dragged against his as she shifted, rocked, took a deep breath.

He rested his chin on her shoulder and closed his eyes. Blue darkness behind them, and silence except for the engine growl of two rapidly thumping hearts.

Then, light.

Looking up, he traced it. A red illumination glowed atop the butte. His eyes darted, picking out the sources. Smears of orange and gold became sharper, brighter, hungrier. Fires rising into the night. Shadows passed around them. The flames looked tall, and seemed to be growing. They merged and distinguished themselves again in his vision, interspersed with the dark shapes that seemed to twist and bend and leap behind and before them.

His ears filled with drumbeats. The roar of tinnitus on his right ear began to spread through his entire skull. Max bent that side towards the butte top. If he heard something from it, heard it through his deafness, then it wasn’t a real sound. He couldn’t catch the crackle of the blaze, and what whiffs of smoke his nostrils caught were faint. Maybe because he wasn’t breathing **,** watching the rooftop gardens shatter into an inferno.

Water ran out of his eyes. When he blinked his vision clear, the fires were separated again, spaced out. It was impossible to judge their size, but the dark shapes in between them took on recognizable form. People, and trees, and growing plants.

Furiosa turned, her hand curling against his chest. “Do you see something?”

“Is there a fire up here?”

She breathed out, then said, “Three of them.”

Max nodded. It felt as if his mind had dropped from the top of the butte, plummeted into the pool. In its way, a release. He shuddered at the press of a night wind. Water dripped from her fingers and trickled over his skin.

When he turned his left ear towards the bonfires, he picked up very faintly noises from human throats. Shouts, laughter, and singing.

He put an arm around Furiosa’s hip, letting her wrap him closer.

“This is just the beginning,” she said. “A quarter of a thousand days. Maybe that deserves more than one night.”

“Yeah.”

A different strain joined the human voices, something wiry but mellow. He recognized Capable’s guitar, though not the song. Furiosa began to hum along. Her breath traced over his skin in the wake of the water.

“Do you want to join them?” he asked.

“Not right now.” A trace of amusement in her voice. “Tomorrow, maybe…”

As she trailed off, he braced himself for another invitation. One it would hurt to refuse, but which he would have to. He wasn’t a man for celebrations.

But Furiosa didn’t ask. Her arm settled around his waist, her head against his shoulder. Slowly, they began to sway. Feet rocked on the sandy bottom of the pool, hips turned with the distant music. Her breasts rose against his chest in a deep inhalation that seemed in counterpoint to a long, joyful howl from the clifftop at the climax of the lyrics.

Then she pushed Max into the water. When he surfaced, sputtering, she stroked her hand through his hair, as if washing it was her excuse for dipping him. But he knew better. He pulled her in too, and they wrestled their way to the shore. She laughed, the sound as unexpected as her humming. It took him some time to recognize the second, rougher laughter as his own.

 They dressed in clothes that clung damply to their body, shivering at a cool breeze. As they hurried towards the lift, two figures dashed past them in the shadows. He made out the silhouette of one of the Water Mothers as she waded into the pool, leading her partner by the hand.

They encountered no one else on the way up and through the warrens of stone corridors. A few people, mechanics, former War Boys, and women he recognized from the Vuvalini’s target training, had gathered in a niche by the garage gates, but they exchanged nods with Furiosa and let them go in. Max spotted his car near the entrance. Several new parts gleamed, and even the old ones had been scrubbed of layers of dirt and rust. The wheels had been replaced, though he resisted the urge to crack the hood or peer underneath at the axle. Furiosa had slowed her progress towards the shadowed back of the garage to wait for him.

He caught up with her in front of the new Rig. She climbed onto the cab step and offered him a hand up. Her prosthetic, extended, paralleled the carving on the driver’s door. She swung it open, pulling him after her, and they climbed inside over the leather seats. It seemed smaller than the War Rig, but not by much; not as gilded but cleaner. As Max maneuvered around the carved wooden handle of the gearshift—from the Green Place’s trees, a more startling material than bone—he glanced under the axle waiting for her raven-winged wheel.

Furiosa caught him examining the series of switches. “Just like before,” she murmured. Their eyes met, and she nodded quickly before climbing into the back. 

_One—one-two—red—black—go._ He’d probably never need to use it again, but knowing it was still a matter of trust. “Thank you,” he said as he followed her.

The hilt of a knife gleamed where it hadn’t been fully tucked behind a leather panel, and he thought he spotted the butt of a gun protruding from one of the side pouches. There’d be more around that he couldn’t see, and even more packed in before the Rig went on its first trading mission. From a space under the front seats Furiosa pulled out a lantern, flint, and iron strike-light in the shape of a broken gear. Before lighting it, she handed him a Vuvalini blanket to spread over the leather bench.

A leather handle had been bolted to the cab frame above the door. Max reached for it, checking the angle, then nodded; this would do. By feel—the lantern oil had caught, its faint light growing, but for some reason he was hesitant to watch his fingers—he slipped the cord bracelet off his wrist and began to unbraid it.  

It took several tries. Even though he’d already loosened the strands that morning, his fingers kept slipping and dropping them. Furiosa waited, crouched on the floor. At last he held the cords out. She didn’t take them, even when she got onto the seat beside him.

She seemed to look past his shoulder, into the darkness. Whatever she saw there made her frown slightly.

“I know it’s…different,” he began.

She shook her head. “I’ve done this before.” When his eyes widened on her, surprised, she added, “Not for fun.”

The words weren’t bitter, but rough as grit, as rust, as broken things. Her gaze dropped after the confession, strain pulling her cheek as hollow as a skull’s.

It wasn’t too late to stop, to climb down from the Rig and walk away. But he didn’t, because that wasn’t what she wanted; if she had she would have said so. If they needed to, they would stop—Max didn’t doubt that for a moment, but he also knew they weren’t there yet. She was just explaining.

Maybe she expected that her explanation would make him want to leave, to call this off. Because after what she had done, why should he let her do it to him?

He put the cords in the hands that had touched him so carefully, draping them over flesh and metal fingers that curled slowly to accept them. He touched her knuckles but didn’t press on them, knowing she couldn’t go any faster. Redemption wasn’t something you found in one piece. It had to be earned, deed by deed, lesson by lesson. Like trust—in others, in yourself.

And who was he to teach her, when he was still learning to be part of a world put right, when his desires frightened him as badly as threats?

“This is different,” he said again. Furiosa’s eyes met his and this time he saw the gleam of her irony. She didn’t have to say aloud, _Well, you’re the expert_.

Although it wouldn’t have been true. He hadn’t done this before, not as a— _game_ wasn’t the right word—but when he’d been bound in fact, it certainly hadn’t been one. Hadn’t been a choice. Now it was.

He sat back again and turned towards her, stretching his left leg out along the length of the seat. She edged closer and straddled his thigh. She watched him raise his hands towards the handle at the corner of the door. With a nod, she began to weave the cords through the handle and around his wrists, then his forearms. They were so soft, a little damp from contact with their skin, thin enough that he imagined he could break them, though he knew they were stronger than they seemed. The thought wasn’t necessary to comfort him—his heart quickened as she twisted a knot, jumping in his throat, but in something hotter than fear—if anything, it was surprise. _So this is what it’s like._

Where her thighs brushed his, his pulse pounded with deeper heat, stronger urgency. _This._

She slipped one of her fingers against the inside of his wrist, pulling a little to test both the security and the laxness of the ties. She must feel the proof in his blood flowing just under the skin.

Once she let go, and there were only the ropes to hold him, his instincts warred: test them, fight them, surrender. His arms relaxed, but remained in their hold, supported, strangely buoyant. It felt almost like the water in the pool below. His eyes closed as he submerged himself.

The fact of his entanglement surrounded him. Now that he’d made his choice, there didn’t have to be any others. Even if he wanted to, even if he felt he must, he couldn’t escape. He wouldn’t be able to run from fear of breaking, or turn away because he didn’t deserve this, or deny what it felt like when she—

—touched him. Her hand gripped his and squeezed until he returned her grasp, eyes opening. She nodded with a satisfied grunt from the back of her throat. “Stay with me.”

It wasn’t difficult when she was so near. When she was the one who had bound him. When she straddled him, careful and watchful. He asked, “How do I look?”

“Shiny.” She spoke with that dry irony, answering his own tone. Light, teasing—flirtatious.

Then she leaned closer and murmured, correcting herself, “Beautiful.”

He wouldn’t be able to leave the seat, but he could lean forward for her lips. Giving them, she caught him up and swallowed, answering his flick of tongue that was lighter and more flirtatious than any of their words. When the kiss ended, they rested cheek to cheek.

She rolled her forehead against his, held it there a moment before pulling back. His eyelids felt heavy again and he fought to keep them open. She reached down between them to unlace her leggings, then his. When she unfastened her prosthesis and hung it at the front of the cab, she left him there for what felt like an endless moment, restrained and exposed. Untouched.

Her fingers ran along his right arm, nudging the sleeve out from under the cords that had caught it. She rolled the fabric past his elbow, eyes narrowed, until she pressed the scarred point where the needle had gone in. It felt sharp, as if his skin was being pierced all over again. But he didn’t try to pull away, and not just because his bonds held him. She’d moved slowly enough that he had time to prepare like he would have for another needle. To brace and hold still.

Letting out a low, rough breath, almost humming, she moved along.

Her hand slid past his throat, lingering there for the space of an unsteady breath before continuing down his chest, getting under the hem of his shirt and pushing it up. Her palm moved in circles over his stomach. The humming grew higher, sweeter, until it suddenly went silent. She had touched him so many times before—bathing, offering comfort or direction—but this was for no other reason than her own interest, her pleasure in the discovery. She must be able to feel the tension rippling in his muscles, the blood pounding in his veins, the spreading thrill of arousal. His nipples hardened as she circled them. He hissed in surprise at his own sensitivity. With the pad of her fingers, she pinched lightly, then flicked over the sting.

When her eyes went to his face, measuring his reaction, he offered her a quivering smile. She kissed it off his mouth and began to nibble his lower lip. He’d forgotten how good that could feel. Convinced that intimacy would hurt, would break him, he’d lost track of the pleasures which came from teasing, playful nips and pinches. She was relaxing her carefulness, realizing they’d both made it through the previous night. Because he had let her do whatever she wanted, trusting her whether or not she held back, it had made this possible.         

Her nails trailed over his ribs, ticklish more than scratching, then moved around to his back. She counted the knobs of his spine, climbing them like a ladder in a shiver-inducing stroke. Her fingertips seemed to read from him, something far deeper than the words stained there, something that could only be said with touch. At the top of his spine, she gasped his nape, steadying herself as she began to rock, her hips rolling in his lap. She had to let go of him to pull her leggings farther open. Her left arm curved around his side, holding them close.

She slipped her thumb in his mouth to wet it, then drew it along his lower lip. Her head and shoulders eclipsed the lantern light, but he made out the edge of her smile. She played with him like a rare and intricate tool, like a child running their first small practice engine or a novice hunter catching their foot in their first test trap— _I can_ do _this?_ —like Seed played with Cheedo’s bracelet or Toast played the Vuvalini music box. Something more than useful, something beautiful.

He played, too, lifting his leg to press his thigh against her groin, turning his body towards her.

When her wet fingers reached into his trousers and circled his cock, it was an extension of the rest of her touch, surprisingly natural. But that didn’t keep him from falling, plummeting at the shock of sensation until something caught him. Until his bonds did. As they were meant to.

They didn’t hold him back; he pushed his hips up into her hold. After only a few slow strokes she reached up to check him again, squeezing his hands. He made a protesting noise, a short and helpless moan, but returned the check. Furiosa nodded and spat in her hand, applying more friction with her grip and twisting her wrist at the head of his cock. Something passed between them like lightening in a sandstorm. Still playful, and growing braver—it seemed each thing they did together was the bravest they’d ever done; maybe one day they’d run out of challenges before running out of courage—she explored the rest of him, tracing the veins along his length, weighing and rolling his balls in her hand, caressing the skin behind them and rubbing the pad of her finger over his hole. She couldn’t have had many opportunities like this before, and she made the most of it. Tied and helpless and electrically sensitive, he could only feel her at play, feel the things she made him feel.

Her touch provoked a response as involuntary as drowning. He pushed against her again, as much as he could, seeking more, suddenly desperate and alive. Furiosa made a humming sound that roughened as she rocked faster against him. When the head of his erection brushed her forearm, her tempo stuttered and she jerked back in a moment’s surprise. She lifted her arm, lips pressing into a narrow smile before her tongue darted out to lick the kiss of clear wetness left on her wrist. That was the last thing he saw clearly before her hand returned to stroking him and his eyes rolled back, lids heavy. His hips shoved, fucking into her fist. It had been so long since he’d fucked, but now he was doing it effortlessly, helplessly.

Her palm rolled over his head, fingers twisting down his shaft for a few further thrusts, but then her pace began to slow. He opened his eyes as her grip relaxed and saw her wince. She lifted her hand, flexing it and her wrist.

The glowing red ache, half pleasure and half desperation, seemed to spread up from his thighs through his entire body. He pleaded with her, beyond words, getting out only a dry and unsteady whimper.

“Shh.” Her breath fell across his lips, his jaw, a patch of skin at the joint of his neck that he’d never realized could feel so vulnerable. “I know. You’re all right.”

His closed eyelids fluttered as heat of her mouth drew closer, sealed over his flesh. Her hand cupped the back of his head, fingers burrowing in his hair until they reached the curve of a scar. She followed it, her mouth pulling back as she traced the marks over his scalp, above his left ear, bisecting one eyebrow. He imagined her green eyes, open and moving over him with the sort of precise attention a sniper developed. Not violent, though, not even wary. The warmth of it passed over his skin as surely as her touch. He didn’t open his own eyes to see. Didn’t need to.

She kissed him again, this time on his upper arm, between the cords, where the needle had left its dimple of scar tissue. He leaned forward, as close as he could get, nuzzling her neck, breathing in her scent. Her breath caught.

Her hand left him and he opened his eyes to see her tug at her trousers, pulling them farther down. She took his cock and angled it towards her, then sank down slowly. She rolled her hips, riding him for a few strokes, tongue slipping over her bottom lip. She didn’t take him all the way in—maybe she didn’t want to, maybe she couldn’t, because of the angle or other reasons. Her body was so slick that they moved together easily, her heat and the power of the muscles gripping him enough to bring him right to the edge. But not over. Something held him back, held them both back.

He was losing his mind with the unfamiliarity of it—or the familiarity of it, returning in a flood through his body and senses—or the sheer intensity. She gripped his shoulder hard, hooking her left arm around his neck. Shudders moved along her limbs, jerky tremors tightening and releasing. Yet it didn’t seem to be too much for her. She was always better at taking chances than he was. That was how they found their way here. Even after he had broken open for her and then run from it.

He couldn’t run now. He didn’t have to. With the pleasure that spread through him, there came something else—the elusive feeling of being okay, even with not being okay. Of caring too much to ever be safe again, and of that not mattering. At least not at this moment, or the next, or the next.

Her mouth returned to him, hungry, licking and sucking. Then she pulled away with a sharp gasp, almost a cry.

Her hand found his fingers and squeezed. He squeezed back, answering her check. She lifted herself off him and reached down. As she began to work at herself, he smelled her and it made his mouth ache with wanting. But there was no space for them to get in that position; she’d have to untie him, and he wasn’t ready for that yet. Furiosa seemed too far down her own road to even think of it.

He nuzzled her shoulder, kissed what he could of her. He licked at the sweat beading on the tops of her breasts. She bore down on his thigh with a rush of wet arousal he felt even through his leather leggings. When her hand returned to his cock, it was slick with it. Her scent, salty and mineral and pungent, filled the air between them.

He breathed it in until breath felt like the most solid part of him. Breath and the heat of her body straddling him and, as if at a distance, her grip between his thighs. And if he was so firmly tied, why did he feel suddenly unbound? Untangled—uncoiled—unraveled. Undone. He was so, so close to being undone. He was overwhelmed by her closeness, by how much he had let her see of him, touch and know. It might have been what saved him but it might also spell disaster. He had no armor, no defense—

“Max.” Her lips shaped the word at the corner of his eyes, where her mouth hovered as if to kiss him again. Instead she only spoke, her soft breath stirring his lashes. Saying his name, just that, a thread of sound, and at first it felt as if she’d broken him.

But if he was broken again, it had been done carefully. It hurt the way he needed it to. Recentering him.

Her hand moved over him in a long, slow stroke. Her fingers were hot, wet, and strong and the sensation—this close to enough—felt utterly new to him. The ropes, by contrast, were familiar. He’d been hanging in them until it felt natural. Like an article of clothing, he would be naked without them.

He _was_ naked, bared to her touch, and he couldn’t return or evade it. It felt good, swollen and tender and rocking through his body and completely out of his control. And because it was good, because it was new, because it was from her, he was made more vulnerable than he had ever been. Still, he trusted her.

Maybe she knew what she was doing to him. Her strokes slowed again and she murmured his name some more, her mouth close to his ear. He felt her kiss him again, hunting out his scars. And she couldn’t know what that meant; he didn’t know it himself. Only that, scarjoy or not, when he was touched where he was broken it was sweet and yet it was like being scarred all over again. She wouldn’t harm him. But it hurt. It was hurt that he wanted and it was good.

Until, vulnerable, he moved beyond that. Beyond hurt. Beyond anxiety about being hurt, about whether it was good or bad or dangerous. Beyond trust. Because she _could_ harm him, she was capable of it. She could scar him, she could damage him even in ways he didn’t want. And it would be okay. He already bore scars for her. He could survive it. He was willing to.

As her left arm hooked around the back of his neck, pulling them almost too close, he felt the softness of her skin against seared tissue and he thought, _I’d wear her brand_. She would never ask him to, but he could. Just as she had never asked for his blood. But he could give it anyway. And once he’d been able to do that there was no holding back. All he’d wanted for so long was self-preservation and now, with her, it didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t have to matter.

It would not break him to be broken.

He was losing himself in the feeling of flesh moving against flesh, and the feeling of helplessness and something that was not quite fear, but was not quite anything else. Because he knew he was lost. He was losing himself to her and it was all right; he wanted her. He wanted whatever she did. He cared for her far too much to ever be safe again and it was okay.

Her hand stroked faster, tighter. She breathed his name and he surrendered.

He couldn’t come for himself, but he could for her. As if it were a gift.

The sensation was overwhelming and new and strange. He couldn’t remember the time of his last orgasm, and maybe this would have been different anyway. It must be. His hands formed fists, straining against the cords. The bite in the skin of his forearms mixed with the tension rippling from the small of his back. It went on, on. He was opened and pouring out. Through it all, she held him. He was aware of her hold even more than of his bonds.

At last he opened his eyes.

They met hers, their steady, clear green made tawny by the lamplight. She watched him watch as she lifted her hand and licked the thick white liquid from her fingers. His breathing trembled in his chest.

Furiosa brought out the canteen, rinsed her mouth and offered him water too. He drank until drops spilled down his neck, so cool against his warm body. Her heat was soothing. He bent against her as she climbed back in his lap. They came to rest brow-to-brow, both her arms around him, her right hand linked to her left forearm, knuckles passing over his brand. At first, she was shaking. She seemed to hold him with the same desperation as he had needed to be bound.

“It was okay?” she asked, swallowing several times to get out the question.

He couldn’t find words for everything it was. Nor could he thank her for it, any more than she could have thanked him for his blood. He thought she knew, but didn’t know how to make sure of it.

He twisted his hands. They moved freely in the circles of rope but couldn’t be pulled past that, no matter how much he wanted to bring them down. He wanted to touch her, embrace her, collapse around her.

He caught himself in time, though, because after what she had asked he didn’t want to respond with _Let me go._

She would. She always had.

Even now, when he felt how tightly she held him, how much she wanted him. When she knew he was going to leave her tomorrow.

She’d let him go the first time, at the edge of the salt. When he left her at the Citadel, she hadn’t expected him to go. Now she knew. She knew, he thought, that he had only found the courage to do this because he was going to leave the next day.

And she must know, as he did, that every time he came back to her he got a little more entangled.

“Max?”

 “Yeah,” he said.

Her cheek brushed against his. “Are you okay?”

He had to go.

He always would run, ride, drive, race away—that was who he was, the life he belonged to. Max was going to leave the next day and he couldn’t tell her otherwise. He couldn’t promise that he would ever be back—only that, in this one place, he had a reason to return.

But of all the ways he feared being trapped, this wasn’t one of them.

He said, “Better than okay.”

With a slow breath, as if of relief, she began to relax her grip. She leaned back in his lap and reached up for the cords. There was some trick to how she had tied them; with a just few tugs from her fingers she released him. As soon as he could, he put his arms around her. And then, for all he’d wanted to touch her, she almost felt like too much to contain. Her arms like a vise, her heat like a bonfire, the sound of her breath at his ear as loud as a storm, her reality as intense and unmanageable and unbelievable as a dream--all the more so because she was just like him, spent, surprised, and shaking. 

He held on to her anyway. For a long time, until she let him go.


	8. Epilogue: Into the Wasteland (Return, Again)

They were waiting for him at the lift the next morning: Cheedo and the Dag, Capable, Toast and Furiosa. The sun was already a finger’s breadth above the horizon and they each looked awake, but not as if the process of getting that way had been easy. Compared to the sleep he was used to getting, Max felt rested enough.

He and Furiosa had curled in the back of the rig after she untied him, and that was where they had spent most of the rest of the night. Max returned to his room only to finish packing. She had left him at the door with a final soft kiss, eroticism lingering in its warmth. But he remembered how kisses had meant something other than sex or in addition to it in other times and places, to other people. He had taken it as a farewell.

Her shadowed eyes met his and she smiled.

Behind them on the platform rose the massive bulk of Toast’s vehicle—in the library, he’d gathered that she named it “the Enterprise” at a suggestion from one of the elder Vuvalini; Capable had thought it might be the name of a satellite and Cheedo thought it was from a show—and next to it, a handful of mechanics from the garage stood around his car. The blackthumb with long braids waved from behind Max’s wheel, then stepped out, nodding it off to him. Max nodded back, grunting thanks, his eyes already taking in the changes. It looked much as it had, but far less rusty. The new parts didn’t advertise themselves—safer that way, as they’d be conspicuously better quality—but the car had also been cleared of dust and repainted with black and rock-orange.

They hadn’t turbocharged it, though he wouldn’t have been entirely upset if they had, or decorated it with a macabre arsenal the way part of him had half-feared, even knowing how the Citadel had changed. But as he stepped closer, he did notice one new thing. Curtains.

His Interceptor had used an array of woven screens to keep the sun out, and this car now contained similar panels woven from the long leaves of the trees growing on the buttes above them. There were also strips of white fabric, almost gauzy. They could be pulled across to offer a more diffuse light without cutting the sun out entirely, or add an extra layer of insulation on cold desert nights. They also…looked good.

Max didn’t get into the car yet, but braced a hand on its roof to steady himself as the lift jolted to life. Furiosa walked to him, swaying with the motion.

 “It’s been clear,” she told him. “Our lookouts don’t see any storms within a day of here.”

On the far side of the car, Toast laughed at something the mechanic told her, speaking with broad gestures that filled the air between her and Capable. Not far from them, Cheedo and the Dag held hands and rocked together with the rhythm of their descent.

Though there’d been no reason not to expect it, he hadn’t counted on her being there. On any of them being there to watch him leave. Again.

He hadn’t counted on them leaving their celebrations and their full days to come down with him.

Or on her, as he opened the driver’s side door when the lift met the ground with heavy crunch, to open the door on the other side and climb in.

“I’ll ride with you a ways,” she said. “See how she drives.”

“Thank you.”

Through the windshield, Toast raised a hand from her own steering wheel in a silent salute, which he returned. The Enterprise’s engine purred to life, and in a moment so did his—he’d need to think of something to call with this car, since it seemed he was going to keep it. Names weren’t his strong point. But he could try.

They rolled onto the gravel road. As he pressed the accelerator, passing between the buttes, it was if he had never spent a day without his foot to the pedals, leather and metal under his hands, surrounded by the vibration and growl of working pistons. He was impressed, though, by the improvement. The wheels seemed to glide, not as smoothly as if through water, but close. Even the windows had been fixed, he saw as Furiosa rolled the one beside her down. A light breeze stirred the curtains. It didn’t carry in dust; the gravel was packed too firmly for that, and the ground around them was smooth, a deep ochre pocked here and there with green as they drove by the homes alongside the river.

As a length of fabric lifted, Max spotted the familiar barrel of a revolver concealed behind it. One medical kit rested beneath the driver’s chair and he’d found the other stashed in the back when he loaded it with his other supplies. The Citadel’s mechanics had taken nothing, even if he wouldn’t have begrudged them it for the job they’d done. The kit had even felt a little heavier than when he arrived here, and stowed in various compartments he found bottles of water and bags of dried provisions, even, beneath a hidden panel in the floor under the rear seat, a thick, sealed jug of gasoline.

Raising her right hand, Furiosa made a gesture to Toast as she pulled up alongside them. Then she turned, putting her shoulder through the window to send a signal farther behind. Max was about to ask what she meant by it when a distant burst reached his ear and blossoming orange and scarlet flares unfurled in the sky over the Citadel.

He watched in the mirror as the wind pulled them into streamers.

“More celebration?” he asked. If the flares had meant something else, a warning or alarm, Furiosa would not be sitting so relaxed beside him. He knew that, and there was the gesture she’d made just before they went up, but a part of him still waited to stand down until she nodded. Probably it always would. It had kept him alive up to now. But when he met her eyes it drained away, and he looked back to the road, the corners of his lips pulling.

“That’s part of it,” she said. “It’s a signal, too. It means farewell to a friend.”

“Huh,” he said, and then again—a slow beginning of laughter. Not just at the joke, although it was one; all the times he’d ridden or walked away, hardly anyone ever noticed, and if they’d celebrated it, he hadn’t been included. Also with surprise, that anyone thought to share that celebration. And with the lack of surprise, instead the recognition, that of course they would; if anyone, _they_ would.

“They’re beautiful,” he said with one last glance in the mirror.

Her left hand reached across the space between them, metal fingers lightly brushing the backs of his where they rested on the wheel. Not for long. No need for more than that.

And she didn’t want to distract him from the road. The Enterprise slipped toward them as they rounded a bend in the narrowing river, a controlled curve meant to get his attention. Once she had it, her engine snarled—playfully, it was laughter from a machine—and Cheedo and the Dag’s faces grinned at them from the truck bed as the vehicle soared ahead. 

“So you want to race?” No way he could call loud enough for Toast to hear him, and his words would just be thrown back in his face with her exhausted. But he wasn’t completely back to thinking aloud, talking to himself—Furiosa chuckled next to him, and as he gunned his own engine she leaned out the window to make another gesture, mock-aggressive.

The last of the homes had fallen behind them, and now they turned away from the river, picking up speed past the few stubborn things that grew beyond it. Prickly branches rattled in the wind from their wake. It rushed through the cab, curtains straining at the ties that knotted them out of his way and flying around Furiosa’s face until she caught them back. It wasn’t as incongruous an image as he once would have thought, her surrounded by airborne, soft things.

She caught him watching and gestured ahead of them. “Fang it!”

He did, coming up to the Enterprise’s right. Capable, beside Toast in the front, turned in her seat, beaming and shouting something he couldn’t make out, but he might have caught “old” and “show you!” They picked up another notch of speed. He answered with his foot to the floor.

After four days moving at the speed of his own feet—and sometimes, dizzyingly, at other speeds, of memory and dreams and the deep, infinitely fast stillness of Furiosa—it was more than a relief to drive, to race. It was _fun._

They soared across the landscape, effortless and free, with nothing at stake. Except pride. The Dag whooped, making a mock jeering gesture as he passed. Toast might have done the same, but her eyes were narrowed on the road ahead, her hands firm on the wheel, lips pulling back from her teeth in a grin of concentration. Watching in his mirror, Max held back from making any response of his own. No need to taunt them.

Cheedo had leaned through the truck’s back window to join Capable bending over something—Toast’s map, he realized when they lifted it, pointing at something in the distance that aligned. Shimmering through dust and heat haze, he could make out the oil refineries far down the road. Gastown, now just an outpost of the Citadel. Back in their reflection, Toast was nodding and, without lifting her hand from the wheel, pointing with her thumb towards somewhere more northwest.

He remembered the sites they’d marked together on their maps—the last place she had seen her people’s caravan, and closer, the place from which he’d oriented himself to it, the first place all of them had met.

“Hey,” Furiosa said beside him. “If you keep this fast, stay on the road for now.”

Even with his attention elsewhere, he hadn’t drifted far toward the gravel’s edge, but it was a fair warning. Sooner or later he would have to go off-road. Gastown wasn’t his destination.

“There’s some traps out there we haven’t sprung yet,” she explained, then pressed her lips in a closed-mouthed smile. It was a sentence with more than one meaning. He smiled back with the same ruefulness.

His map was folded in a pocket, but he didn’t take it out; he didn’t need it to know when the time had come to slow down and turn left, from gravel to sand. The morning sun threw their shadows out behind them. The mirror showed theirs falling across the Enterprise’s hood, but Toast didn’t try to catch up yet. She was also being careful. It shouldn’t surprise him, but some part of Max was never going to forget how to worry.

He mostly kept his eyes narrowed on the uneven ground ahead, but glanced to the side once to see Furiosa looking in the rear-view mirror. Whatever she saw there kept the smile on her face.

He was going to remember that; he knew it even as his attention returned to the roadless dust. The thought was good, but it also felt like something rusted out inside him. The realization that they were nearing the point where he would ride on alone.

For a final ride, this wasn’t bad.

He’d given her his blood on their last, last ride together; today he had nothing close to that, even when he’d received so much more. What would possibly make a fair exchange?

Shouting and waving, the girls passed them. They grinned with the thrill of the race. Max didn’t try to speed up—Toast knew this territory, but he was keeping Furiosa’s warning in mind, and anyway, he had a much longer way to go before he could refuel. Plus he wanted to let the young ones think they’d won against a road warrior; it seemed to mean so much more to their pride than to his.

 All perfectly good reasons. And anyway, he enjoyed the sight of the four of them laughing and celebrating as they pulled ahead.

He and Furiosa watched them come in and out of sight as the ground rose and fell in low hills. Then they disappeared around an outcrop of rock. Max rounded it after them, but for half a click he had nothing but the tracks of their wheels, already fading in the wind and slide of sand.

_Come on, pa!_

Not a surprise, that voice; his hands didn’t move on the wheel. The corner of his mouth twitched, fondly. He wasn’t alone out here, not with his ghosts, his memories—all the ones he’d loved, living or dead, and even the dead ones alive enough. The world itself was more alive than he had believed, and maybe—though he couldn’t be certain, yet—instead of dying, it was growing.

They found the Enterprise stopped on one of the hills. Toast stood with her sisters in the bed. Cheedo and the Dag held hands again, heads bent together. (Wives, he remembered, like dusting grime from the word to know that Joe wasn’t the one who could claim it now). Capable took her hand from Toast’s back and climbed down first as they approached.

Furiosa pushed her door open, but didn’t move further except to look at him. After a moment, Max understood. He nodded and stepped out with her.

Toast leapt to the sand and met them on the slope between their vehicles. The others joined them in a circle. Max looked around, from face to face, woman to woman, unsure what would be right. Unsure what was needed.

He wanted to give them whatever was necessary.

But not from a feeling of desperation, of time growing short. Not because they would be helpless without him, either. He looked between them—Toast in her road warrior leather and hood, which had fallen back from her face to show the scar as a faint shadow where the sun touched her cheek. But like no road warrior he’d ever seen before: the Vuvalini band around her arm, something about her gentler and wiser and more hopeful. She wasn’t going out there to flee or fight; she was looking for home.

Cheedo stood beside her, her bare shoulders marked with history. She held the Dag’s hand, where the tattoos on her knuckles stood out against a dusting of soil and green stains. The Dag had coiled a fresh green spring in the hair above her ear, tightly enough that the ride hadn’t dislodged it.

And Capable was on Toast’s other side, the map tucked in a pouch at her waist. Her hair hung in Water-Mother braids and keys and a file chimed at her belt. He remembered her tracing Angharad’s painted words in the library, the sound of her guitar drifting across the Citadel in the night air, strings plucked by hands that had broken chains.

Then Furiosa; he didn’t have to turn his head to see her. He had nothing left to say to her, and everything, and he had the haunting feeling that it wasn’t yet time. That some things could go unsaid, or should, or must. That, after the entire world had lived and died, there still were not words for some things, and they could be known anyway.

Toast took a step forward, lifting her hand. She smiled at Max took it and tightened her grip firmly to match his hold.

“Glad you found me,” he told her.

“I’m glad you came back.”

As they dropped their hands, he tipped his head back, gesturing toward his half-rebuilt vehicle. “You know what to look for.”

She nodded to the Enterprise. “You, too.”

Capable took both his hands in hers, squeezing even harder than Toast had, her smile warm. Her thumb rubbed the scar tissue at the base of the small fingers on his left hand, and he could almost feel her touch in the deadened parts of his palm. He knew better than to be afraid of hurting her with his return squeeze, and they let the gesture make up for the few words that had gone between them. The Dag only nodded to him with a short wave, but that meant as much. They exchanged crooked grins as he returned the salute. Then Cheedo stepped up and put her arms around him. Both of them were quietly startled by the gesture; she moved away almost before he realized what was happening and he just had time to wrap an arm around her back to return it. 

When he turned to Furiosa, it also seemed to move too quickly, or else as quickly as it needed to. She was already in front of him. He was already reaching out to her.

He felt the heat of her breath against his lips, but it wasn’t a kiss; it was something else and more. Her hand rested at the back of his neck, and his on hers. Their foreheads met, and eyes closed. He stood joined to her by the touch for what could have been days. It still wouldn’t be long enough.

He could stay.

For another day, for a thousand days. He could climb back into the car and drive up that road to the Citadel again and let the new axle rust out unused. They’d find room for him. They’d fine a use for him. It wouldn’t matter if they did or not, because he wasn’t just something useful to them; they’d let him stay.

Max knew that.

It was why he could leave today.

Because he had the choice.

It wasn’t easy to let go of her. Even if he felt the time between them, there still wasn’t enough of it. He cared for her too much for it to seem simple, to seem safe. It never would. Okay. He understood, and at least, at last, he could choose how and why he would not be safe, why he would be broken, and what would happen to the pieces left behind. What would grow from them. What would live again (more words they were learning, all of them, to reclaim).

It wasn’t easy to let go; he did it, though, eventually, his palm sliding over her scarred nape and her short hair. Her fingers curled against his scalp and ran down his neck and shoulder as she stepped back, too. He reached for her hand.

She gave it, her expression soft and questioning.

“I…here.” He handed her the bracelet—rewoven, not as tightly as it had been before, but as carefully as he could in the early hours of that morning. In his room, once he had finished everything else he could, when he hadn’t been certain he would see her again. But a part of him had hoped.

His wrist felt empty without it, but not badly. It was lighter, freer. And this was a gift, not a sacrifice.

He was glad to have something to offer. It was the best thanks and reassurance he could give after last night.

And—as she bent her arm, letting him slide the bracelet on, pulling gently on the cord ends so it fit—he told her, “I’ll be back for it, someday.”

“I know you will.” She turned her hands and let her fingers circle his wrist for a moment, holding tight. He nodded, pulse kicking up, a heat kindling deeper inside him.

When he did, when he asked and she gave it back—in coils that bound his hands, that entangled him, that cradled and overpowered and broke through him—at the end of it, he knew she would let him go again, without any sign of holding back, without any promise from him except the fact of who he was and who they were together.

Because he trusted her enough to have him and she trusted him enough to let him go. She’d given herself to him, too, more than he was sure he could let go of. She had a part of him bound still. He had handed it over willingly. Both of them knew.

“Until then,” she said.

 He walked back to his car. She climbed into the Enterprise and when she sat in the back, the others bent their heads over the bracelet. Max wondered how much of the story she’d tell them.

He started the engine, still watching her. She looked up as his vehicle came alive and started up, then over the hill. He raised a hand as they passed—the gesture so small after everything, but impossible not to make. Impossible not to acknowledge her.

Her right hand still held by the young women around her, she raised her left instead, sunlight dancing on it so brightly he imagined he could see a rainbow. There may have been a shimmer of water in her eyes, or in his.  

For a while he could spot the Enterprise when he looked in the mirror, a small shape speeding confidently over the dips and rises toward the straight band of the road. Then it faded behind the last gleam of the river, in the shadows thrown by the arms of the buttes. The Citadel’s flares had vanished in the winds, but he caught glimpses of its high, green gardens now and then, if he strained his eyes, or if he dreamed it. The sky was pure azure overhead, clean as water.

He drove for the horizon that forever receded before him, klick by klick, always revealing more between him and its empty edge. He didn’t need to consult his map yet, but he felt it folded in the pocket over his heart. Something might await him ahead—he wasn’t sure yet, couldn’t say where he was going, but this time he wasn’t running away. A world unfolded around him and his quiet ghosts, stone and sand, with wounds gouged by storms and divots stained with ash and torn metal. Red earth and blue sky and here and there a shock of stubborn green. There were traps out there that nobody had sprung yet. There were unseen eyes on him and ambushes he might not notice until it was too late. Nothing the likes of which he hadn’t encountered before—but there was that too, so much he hadn’t yet discovered, so much he had to relearn and remember, so much that he would recognize once he saw it and even more that he would never have imagined.

Max rode on through a wilderness that was scarred but not dead, a world that was broken and broken open and from which new things might still grow, on a road that was nothing but ground that could take his wheels, a road that refused to end, that he would never want to end, but that might in time, here and there, work its way back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't write an entire story around the theme of healing enough to be vulnerable and then shy away from some vulnerability myself, so: hi! Thank you for reading to the end! I've been working on "Four Days" for so long that I still can't quite believe this is the end. And part of me is worried that, after it took so long to get here--to this chapter which has been in my mind for well over a year at this point, continuing a theme I saw in "Fury Road" about repeating actions while reclaiming them with agency and choice; though the details kept being reworked right up until today--I might be letting you down. I know this isn't the traditional "happily ever after" ending, but to be honest I never believed I could write Max settling down permanently. He's meant for a different sort of "ever after." But that doesn't mean there can't be happiness in it. 
> 
> Speaking of which, working on this story has made me so happy, most of all because of readers like you. Your kind and insightful comments have been so, so welcome. Your patience and loyalty as I worked through this chapter by chapter, day by day, are appreciated more than I can say. 
> 
> Writing this story stretched creative muscles, teaching me to do new things (like Max, I found the process startling and frightening and rewarding in equal measure). Aspects of the writing were definitely therapeutic, though major life changes over the past year have altered the way I approach things like anxiety, loss, pleasure, trust, and hope. Even so, I continue to keep these themes in mind--landmarks on a map that might not be of the territory I thought I was in, but which still can guide me through. 
> 
> (I don't know anyone 2016 was easy for, so on that note--Hey! We made it! Well done!)
> 
> And last but by no means least, back when "Four Days" was the glimmer of a potential one-shot in my eye, this is the (not entirely safe for work) fanart that inspired it: https://mumblingsage.tumblr.com/post/120722508424/gregorywelter-tom-hardy-is-very-handsome-3-i#notes
> 
> I mean, that's just wonderful. 
> 
> Farewell, reader. Until next time--journey well.


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